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AN OEATIOI 



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JULY ±, 1861. 



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THE GREAT ISSUES NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 



AN ORATION 



EDWARD EVERETT. 



DELIVERED AT THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC. 

JULY 4^, 1861. 



NEW YORK: 
JAMES G. GREGORY, 

(srCCES80R TO W. A. TOWN8BND 4 CO..) 

NO. 46 WALKER STREET. 
1861. 






Sonrce nuYun-wH 



0. A. ALVOBD, PRINTER. 



THE GREAT ISSUES 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY.* 



When the Congress of the United States, on the 4th of July, 1776, issu- 
ed the ever memorable Declaration, they deemed that a decent respect for 
the opinions of mankind, required a formal statement of the causee which 
impelled them to the all-important measure. The eighty-fifth anniversary 
of the great Declaration finds the loyal people of the Union engaged in a 
tremendous conflict, to maintain and defend the grand nationality which 
was asserted by our fathers, and to prevent their fair creation from crumb- 
ling into dishonorable chaos. A great people gallantly struggling to keep 
a noble frame-work of government from falling into wretched fragments, 
needs no justification at the tribunal of the public opinion of mankind. But 
while our patriotic fellow-citizens, who have rallied to the defence of the 
Union, marshalled by the ablest of living chieftains, are risking their lives 
in the field ; while the precious blood of jout youthful heroes and ours is 
poured out together in defence of this precious legacy of constitutional free- 
dom, you will not think it a misappropriation of the hour, if I employ it in 
showing the justice of the cause in which we are engaged, and the fallacy 
of the arguments employed by the South in vindication of the war, alike 
murderous and suicidal, which she is waging against the Constitution and 
the Union. 

A twelvemonth ago, nay, six or seven months ago, our country was re- 
garded and spoken of by the rest of the civilized world, as among the most 
prosperous in the family of nations. It was classed with England, France, 
and Russia, as one of the four leading powers of the age.f Remote as we 
were from the complications of foreign politics, the extent of our commerce 

* Large portions of this oration were, on account of its length, necessarily omitted 
in the delivery, 
t The Edinburgh Review, April, 1S61, p. 555. 



4 THE GREAT ISSUES 

and the efficiency of our navy won for us the respectful consideration of 
Europe. The United States were particularly referred to on all occasions, 
and in all countries, as an illustration of the mighty influence of free gov- 
ernments in promoting the prosperity of states. In England, notwith- 
standing some diplomatic collisions on boundary questions, and occasional 
hostile reminiscences of the past, there has hardly been a debate for thirty 
years, in ] tarliament, on any topic, in reference to which this country in the na- 
ture of things afforded matters of comparison, in which it was not referred to 
as furnishing instructive examples of prosperous enterprise and hopeful prog- 
ress. At home the country grew as by enchantment. Its vast territo- 
rial extent, augmented by magnificent accessions of conterminous territory 
peacefully made ; its population far more rapidly increasing than that of 
any other country, and swelled by an emigration from Europe such as the 
world has never before seen ; the mutually beneficial intercourse between its 
different sections and climates, each supplying what the other wants ; the 
rapidity with which the arts of civilization have been extended over a 
before unsettled wilderness, and, together with this material prosperity, 
the advance of the country in education, literature, science, and refinement, 
formed a spectacle of which the history of mankind furnished no other 
example. That such was the state of the country six months ago was 
matter of general recognition, and acknowledgment at home and abroad. 

There was, however, one sad deduction to be made, not from the truth 
of this description, not from the fidelity of this picture, for that is incon- 
testable, but from the content, happiness, and mutual good-will which 
ought to have existed on the part of a people favored by such an accumu- 
lation of providential blessings. I allude, of course, to the great sectional 
controversies which have so long agitated the country and arrayed the 
people in bitter geographical antagonism of political organization and 
action. Fierce party contentions had always existed in the United States, 
as they ever have and unquestionably ever will exist under all free elective 
governments ; and these contentions had, from the first, tended somewhat 
to a sectional character. They had not, however, till quite lately, assumed 
that character so exclusively, that the minority in any one part of the 
country had not had a respectable electoral representation in every other. 
Till last November, there has never been a Southern presidential candi- 
date who did not receive electoral votes at the North, nor a Northern can- 
didate who did not receive electoral votes at the South. 

At the late election and for the first time, this was not the case ; and 
consequences the most extraordinary and deplorable have resulted. The 
country, as we have seen, being in profound peace at home and abroad, 
and in a state of unexampled prosperity — agriculture, commerce, naviga- 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. O 

tion, manufactures, east, west, north, and south, recovered or rapidly 
recovering from the crisis of 1857 — powerful and respected abroad, and 
thriving beyond example at home, entered, in the usual manner, upon the 
electioneering campaign, for the choice of a nineteenth President of the 
United States. I say, in the usual manner, though it is true that parties 
were more than usually broken up and subdivided. The normal division 
was iuto two great parties, but there had on several former occasions been 
three; in 1824 there were four, and there were four last November. The 
South equally with the West and the North entered into the canvass; con- 
ventions were held, nominations made, mass meetings assembled ; the 
platform, the press enlisted with unwonted vigor ; the election in all its 
stages, conducted in legal and constitutional form, without violence and 
without surprise, and the result obtained by a decided majority. 

No sooner, however, was this result ascertained, than it appeared on 
the part of one of the Southern states, and her example was rapidly fol- 
lowed by others, that it had by no means been the intention of those states 
to abide by the result of the election, except on the one condition of the 
choice of their candidate. The reference of the great sectional controversy 
to the peaceful arbitrament of the ballot-box, the great safety-valve of 
republican institutions, though made with every appearance of good faith 
on the part of our brethren at the South, meant but this: If we succeed 
in this election, as we have in fifteen that have preceded it, well and good ; 
we will consent to govern the country for four years more, as we have 
already governed it for sixty years ; but we have no intention of acquies- 
cing in any other result. We do not mean to abide by the election, 
although we participate in it, unless our candidate is chosen. If he fails 
we intend to prostrate the government and break up the Union — peace- 
ably, if the states composing the majority are willing that it should be 
broken up peaceably — otherwise, at the point of the sword. 

The election took place on the 6th of November, and in pursuance of 
the extraordinary programme just described, the state of South Carolina, 
acting by a convention chosen for the purpose, assembled ou the 17th of 
December, and on the 20th, passed unanimously what was styled " An 
ordinance to dissolve the Union between the state of South Carolina and 
other states united with her, under the compact entitled the Constitution 
of the United States of America." It is not my purpose on this occasion 
to make a documentary speech, but as this so called "ordinance" is very 
short, and affords matter for deep reflection, I beg leave to recite it in full: 

"We, the people of the slate of South Carolina, in convention assem- 
bled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, that 
the ordinance adopted by us in convention on the 23d day of May, in the 



6 THE GREAT ISSUES 

year of our Lord 1788, whereby the constitution of the United States was 
ratified, and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of 
this state, ratifying the amendments of the said constitution, are hereby 
repealed, and that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and 
other states, under the name of the United States of America, is dissolved." 

This remarkable document is called an "ordinance;" and no doubt some 
special virtue is supposed to reside in the name. But names are nothing 
except as they truly represent things. An ordinance, if it is any thing 
clothed with binding force, is a law, and nothing but a law, and as such 
this ordinance being in direct violation of the constitution of the United 
States is a mere nullity. The constitution contains the following express 
provision: "This constitution and the laws of the United States made in 
pursuance thereof, and the treaties made, or which may be made, under 
the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land, 
and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the 
constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding." Such 
being the express provision of the constitution of the United States, which 
the people of South Carolina adopted in 1788, just as much as they ever 
adopted either of their state constitutions, is it not trifling with serious 
things to claim that, by the simple expedient of passing a law under the 
name of an ordinance, this provision, and every other provision of it may be 
nullified, and every magistrate and officer in Carolina, whether of the state 
or Union, absolved from the oath which they have taken to support it ? 

But this is not all. The secession ordinance purports " to repeal the 
ordinance of the 23d May, 1788, by which the constitution of the United 
States was ratified by the people of South Carolina. It was intended of 
course by calling the act of ratification an ordinance, to infer a right 
of repealing it by another ordinance. It is important therefore to ob- 
serve that the act of ratification is not, and is not called, an ordinance, 
and contains nothing which by possibility can be repealed. It is in the 
following terms : 

"The convention [of the people of South Carolina] having maturely 
considered the constitution, or form of government, reported to Con- 
greas by the convention of delegates from the United States of America, 
and submitted to them by a resolution of legislature of this state, 
passed the 17th and 18th days of February last, in order to form a more 
perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the bless- 
ings of liberty to the people of the said United States and their pos- 
terity, do, in the name and in the behalf of the people of this state 
hereby assent to ratify the same."' 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 7 

Here it is evident that there is nothing in the instrument which in 
the nature of things, can be repealed; it is an authorized solemn as- 
sertion of the people of South Carolina, that they assent to and ratify a 
form of government, which is declared in terms to be paramount to all 
state laws and constitutions. This is a great historical fact, the most 
important that can ever occur in the history of a people. The fact 
that the people of South Carolina, on the 23d of May, 1788, assented to 
and ratified the constitution of the United States, in order, among other 
objects, to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and "their pos- 
terity," can no more be repealed in 1861 than any other historical fact 
that occurred in Charleston in that year and on that day. It would 
be just as rational, at the present day, to attempt by ordinance to re- 
peal any other event — as that the sun rose or that the tide ebbed and 
flowed on that day — as to repeal by ordinance the assent of Carolina to 
the constitution. 

Again; it is well known that the various amendments to the con- 
stitution, were desired and proposed in different states. The first of the 
amendments proposed by South Carolina, was as follows : — 

"Whereas it is essential to the preservation of the rights reserved 
to the several states, and the freedom of the people under the operation 
of the general government, that the right of prescribing the manner, 
times and places of holding the elections of the federal legislature 
should be forever inseparably annexed to the sovereignty of the states ; 
this convention doth declare that the same ought to remain to all pos- 
terity a perpetual and fundamental right in the local, exclusive of the 
interference of the general government, except in cases where the legis- 
lature of the states shaU refuse or neglect to perform or fulfil the same, 
according to the tenor of the said constitution." 

Here you perceive that South Carolina herself in 1788 desired a pro- 
vision to be made and annexed inseparably to her sovereignty, that she 
should forever have the power of prescribing the time, place, and man- 
ner of holding the elections of members of Congress ; — but even in 
making this express reservation, to operate for all posterity, she was 
willing to provide that, if the state legislatures refuse or neglect to 
perform the duty, (which is precisely the case of the seceding states 
at the present day), then the general government was, by this South 
Carolina amendment, expressly authorized to do it. South Carolina in 
1788, by a sort of prophetic foresight, looked forward to the possibility, 
that the states might "refuse or neglect" to co-operate in carrying on 
the government, and admitted, in that case, that the general govern- 
ment must go on in spite of their delinquency. 



8 THE GREAT ISSl'ES 

1 have dwelt on these points at some length, to show how futile is 
the attempt, by giving the name of " ordinance" to the act by which 
South Carolina adopted the constitution and entered the Union, to gain a 
power to leave it by subsequent ordinance of repeal. 

Whether the present unnatural civil war is waged by the South, in 
virtue of a supposed constitutional right to leave the Union at pleasure, 
or whether it is an exercise of the great and ultimate right of revolution, 
the existence of which no one denies, seems to be left in uncertainty 
by the leaders of the movement. Mr. Jefferson Davis, the President of 
the new Confederacy, in his inaugural speech delivered on the 18th of 
February, declares that it is "an abuse of language" to call it "a revolu- 
tion." Mr. Vice-President Stephens, on the contrary, in a speech at 
Savannah, on the 21st of March, pronounces it " one of the greatest rev- 
olutions in the annals of the world." The question is of great mag- 
nitude, as one of constitutional and public law ; as one of morality it is 
of very little consequence whether the country is drenched in blood, in 
the exercise of a right claimed under the constitution, or the right in- 
herent in every community to revolt against an oppressive government. 
Unless the oppression is so extreme as to justify revolution, it would not 
justify the evil of breaking up a government, under an abstract con- 
stitutional right to do so. 

This assumed right of secession rests upon the doctrine that the Union 
is a compact between independent states, from which any one of them 
may withdraw at pleasure in virtue of its sovereignty. This imaginary 
right has been the subject of discussion for more than thirty years, hav- 
ing been originally suggested, though not at first much dwelt upon, in 
connection with the kindred claim of a right, on the part of an individual 
state, to " nullify " an act of Congress. It would, of course, be impossi- 
ble, within the limits of the hour, to review these elaborate discussions. 
I will only remark, on this occasion, that none of the premises from which 
this remarkable conclusion is drawn, are recognized in the constitution, 
and that the right of secession, though called a "reserved" right, is not 
expressly reserved in it. That instrument does not purport to be a "com- 
pact," but a constitution of government. It appears in its first sentence 
not to have been entered into by the states, but to have been ordained 
and established by the people of the United States, for "themselves and 
their posterity." The states are not named in it ; nearly all the character- 
istic powers of sovereignty are expressly granted to the general govern- 
ment, and expressly prohibited to the states, and so far from reserving a 
right of secession to the latter, on any ground or under any pretence, it 
ordains and establishes in terms, the constitution of the United States as 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 9 

the supreme law of the land, any thing in the constitution or laws of any 
state to the contrary notwithstanding. 

It would seem that this was as clear and positive as language can make 
it. But it is argued that, though the right of secession is not reserved in 
terms, it must be considered as implied in the general reservation to the 
states and to the people, of all the powers not granted to Congress nor 
prohibited to the states. This extraordinary assumption, more distinctly 
stated is, that, in direct defiance of the express grant to Congress and the 
express prohibition to the states of nearly all the powers of an indepen- 
dent government, there is, by implication, a right reserved to the states to 
assume and exercise all these powers thus vested in the Union and pro- 
hibited to themselves, simply in virtue of going through the ceremony of 
passing a law called an ordinance of secession. A general reservation to 
the states of powers not prohibited to them nor granted to Congress, is an 
implied reservation to the states of a right to exercise these very powers 
thus expressly delegated to Congress and thus expressly prohibited to the 
states ! 

The constitution declares, that the Congress of the United States shall 
have power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, to raise 
and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy; and it provides that 
the President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent 
of the Senate, shall make treaties with foreign powers. 

These express grants of power to the government of the United States 
are followed by prohibitions as express to the several states : 

" No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, grant 
letters of marque or reprisal ; no state shall, without the consent of Con- 
gress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of 
peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a 
foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such im- 
minent danger as will not admit of delay." 

These and numerous other express grants of power to the general gov- 
ernment, and express prohibitions to the states, are further enforced by 
the comprehensive provision, already recited, that the constitution and 
laws of the United States are paramount to the laws and constitution of 
the separate states. 

And this constitution, with these express grants and express prohibi- 
tions, and with this express subordination of the states to the general 
government, has been adopted by the people of all the states ; and all their 
judges and other officers, and all their citizens holding office under the gov 
ernment of the United States, or the individual states, are solemnly sworn 
to support it. 



10 THE GREAT ISSUES 

In the face of all this, in defiance of all this, in violation of all this, in 
contempt of all this, the seceding states claim the right to exercise every 
power expressly delegated to Congress, and expressly prohibited to the 
states by that constitution which every one of their prominent men, civil 
and military, is under oath to support. They have entered into a con- 
federation, raised an army, attempted to provide a navy, issued letters of 
marque and reprisal, waged war, and that war — merciful heaven forgive 
them! — not with a foreign enemy, not with the wild tribes which still 
desolate the unprotected frontier; (they, it is said, are swelling, armed 
with tomahawk and scalping-knife, the Confederate forces) — but with their 
own countrymen, and the mildest and most beneficent government on the 
face of the earth ! 

But we are told all this is done in virtue of the sovereignty of the states ; 
as if, because a state is sovereign, its people were incompetent to estab- 
lish a government for themselves and their posterity. Certainly the states 
are clothed with sovereignty for local purposes ; but it is doubtful whether 
they ever possessed it in any other sense ; and if they had, it is certain 
that they ceded it to the general government in adopting the constitution. 
Before their independence of England was asserted they constituted a pro- 
vincial people (Burke calls it " a glorious empire"), subject to the British 
crown, organized for certain purposes under separate colonial charters, 
but on some great occasion of political interest and public safety, acting 
as one. Thus they acted when, on the approach of the great Seven Years' 
"War, which exerted such an important influence on the fate of British 
America, they sent their delegates to Albany to concert a plan of union. 
In the discussions of that plan which was reported by Franklin, the citi- 
zens of the colonies were evidently considered as a people. When the 
passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 roused the spirit of resistance through- 
out America, the unity of her people assumed a still more practical form. 
" Union, says one of our great American historians (Bancroft, V. 292) was 
the hope of Otis. Union that ' should knit and work into the very blood 
and bones of the original system every region as fast as settled.' " In this 
hope he argued against writs of assistance, and in this hope he brought 
about the call of the convention at New York in 1765. At that conven- 
tion, the noble South Carolinian, Christopher Gadsden, with almost pro- 
phetic foresight of the disintegrating heresies of the present day, cautioned 
his associates against too great dependence on their colonial charters. "I 
wish," said he, "that the charters may not ensnare us at last, by draw- 
ing different colonies to act differently in this great cause. Whenever that 
is the case all is over with the whole. There ought to be no New England 
man, no New Yorker known on the continent, but all of us Americans." 
(Bancroft, V. 335). 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 1 1 

"While the patriots in America counselled, and wrote, and spoke as a 
people, they were recognized as such in England. "Believe me," cried 
Colonel Barre, in the House of Commons, " I this day told you so, the 
same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany 
them still. The people, I believe, are as truly loyal as any subjects the 
king has, but a people jealous of their liberties, and who will vindicate 
them should they be violated." 

"When, ten years later, the great struggle long foreboded came on, it was 
felt, on both sides of the Atlantic, to be an attempt to reduce a free people 
beyond the sea to unconditional dependence on a Parliament in which they 
were not represented. "What foundation have we," was the language of 
Chatham, on the 27th January, 1775, " for our claims over America? What 
is our right to persist in such cruel and vindictive measures against that 
loyal, respectable people? How have this respectable people behaved 
under all their grievances ? Repeal, therefore, I say. But bare repeal 
will not satisfy this enlightened and spirited people." Lord Camden, in 
the same debate, exclaimed, " You have no right to tax America; the nat- 
ural rights of man and the immutable laws of nature are with that 
people." Burke, two months later, made his great speech for conciliation 
with America. "I do not know," he exclaimed, "the method of drawing 
up an indictment against a whole people." In a letter written two years 
after the commencement of the war, he traces the growth of the colonies 
from their feeble beginnings to the magnitude which they had attained 
when the revolution broke out, and in which his glowing imagination saw 
future grandeur and power beyond the reality. " At the first designation 
of these colonial assemblies," says he, "they were probably not intended 
for any thing more (nor perhaps did they think themselves much higher) 
than the municipal corporations within this island, to which some at pres- 
ent love to compare them. But nothing in progression can rest on its 
original plan ; we may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle 
of an infant. Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a nu- 
merous and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe 
it was natural that they should attribute to assemblies so respectable in 
the formed constitution, some part of the dignity of the great nations 
which they represented." 

The meeting of the first Continental Congress of 1774 was the spon- 
taneous impulse of the people. All their resolves and addresses proceed 
on the assumption that they represented a people. Their first appeal to 
the royal authority was their letter to General Gage, remonstrating against 
the fortifications of Boston. " We entreat your excellency to consider " 
they say, " what a tendency this conduct must have to irritate and force a 



12 THE GREAT ISSUES 

free people, hitherto well disposed to peaceable measures, into hostilities." 
Their final act, at the close of the session, their address to the king, one 
of the most eloquent and pathetic of state papers, appeals to him " in the 
name of ah your majesty's faithful people in America." 

But this all-important principle in our political system is placed beyond 
doubt by an authority which makes all further argument or illustration 
superfluous. That the citizens of the British colonies, however divided 
for local purposes into different governments, when they ceased to be sub- 
ject to the English crown, became ipso facto one people for all the high 
concerns of national existence, is a fact embodied in the Declaration of 
Independence itself. That august manifesto — the Magna Charta which 
introduced us into the family of nations — was issued to the world — so its 
first sentence sets forth — because "a decent respect for the opinions of 
mankind requires " such solemn announcement of motives and causes to 
be made, -'when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for 
one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with 
another." Mr. Jefferson Davis, in his message of the 29th of April, deems 
it important to remark that, by the treaty of peace with Great Britain, 
"the several states were each by name recognized to be independent." 
It woidd be more accurate to say that the United States each by name 
were so recognized. Such enumeration was necessary, in order to fix be- 
yond doubt, which of the Anglo-American colonies, twenty-five or six in 
number, were included in the recognition.* But it is surely a far more 
significant circumstance, that the separate states are not named m the De- 
claration of Independence ; that they are called only by the collective de- 
signation of the United States of America; that the manifesto is issued 
"in the name and by the authority of the good people" of the colonies, 
and that they are characterized in the first sentence as "one people." 

Let it not be thought that these are the latitudinarian doctrines of mod- 
ern times, or of a section of the country predisposed to a loose construc- 
tion of laws and constitutions. Listen, I pray you, to the noble words of 
a revolutionary patriot and statesman : 

" The separate independence and individual sovereignty of the several 
states were never thought of by the enlightened band of patriots who 
framed the Declaration of Independence. The several states are not even 
mentioned by name in any part of it, and it was intended to impress this 
maxim on America, that our freedom and independence arose from our 

* Burke's account of "the English Settlements in America' 1 begins with -Jamaica 
and proceeds through the West India Islands, 'then' were also English settlements on 
the continent, Canada and Nova Scotia, which it was necessary to exclude from the 
treaty, by an enumeration of the included colonies. 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 13 

Union, and that without it we could neither be free nor independent. Let 
us then consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that 
each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of po- 
litical heresy, which can never benefit us, and may bring on us the most 
serious distresses." (Elliott's Debates, IV., p. 301.) These are the 
solemn and prophetic words of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the patriot, 
the soldier, the statesman ; the trusted friend of "Washington, repeatedly 
called by him to the highest offices of the government ; the one name that 
stands highest .and brightest on the list of the great men of South Ca- 
rolina.* 

Not only was the Declaration of Independence made in the name of the 
one people of the United States, but the war by which it was sustained 
was carried on by their authority. A very grave historical error, in this 
respect, is often committed bjr the politicians of the secession school. Mr. 
Davis, in his message of the 29th of April, having called the old confed- 
eration a " close alliance," says : " Under this contract of alliance the war 
of the revolution was successfully waged, and resulted in the treaty of 
peace with Great Britain of 1783, by the terms of which the several states 
were each by name recognized to be independent." I have already given 
the reason for this enumeration, but the main fact alleged in the passage is 
entirely without foundation. The articles of confederation were first sign- 
ed by the delegates from eight of the states, on the 9th of July, 1778, 
more than three years after the commencement of the war, long after the 
capitulation of Burgoyne, the alliance with France, and the reception of a 
French minister. The ratification of the other states was given at inter- 
vals the following years, the last not till 1781, seven months only before 
the virtual close of the war by the surrender of Cornwallis. Then, and 
not till then, was " the contract of alliance" consummated. Most true it 
is, as Mr. Davis bids us remark, that by these articles of confederation the 
states retained " each its sovereignty, freedom and independence." It is 
not less true that their selfish struggle to exercise and enforce their assum- 
ed rights as separate sovereignties was the source of the greatest difficul- 
ties and dangers of the revolution and risked its success ; not less true, 
that most of the great powers of a sovereign state were nominally confer- 
red even by these articles on the Congress, and that that body was regard- 
ed and spoken of by Washington himself as " The Sovereign of the 
Union. (Works, IX. 12, 23, 29.) 

But feeble as the old Confederation was, and distinctly as it recognized 
the sovereignty of the states, it recognized in them no right to withdraw 

* See an admirable sketch of his character in Trescott's Diplomatic History of the 
Administrations of Washington and Adams pp. 169-71. 



14 THE GREAT ISSUES 

at their pleasure from the Union. On the contrary, it was specially pro- 
vided that " the Articles of Confederation should be inviolably preserved 
by every state," and that " the Union should be perpetual." It is true that 
in a few years, from the inherent weakness of the central power, and from 
the want of means to enforce its authority on the individual citizen; it fell 
to pieces. It sickened and died from the poison of what General Pinckney 
aptly called "the heresy of state sovereignty," and in its place a constitu- 
tion was ordained and established " in order to form a more perfect Union ;" 
a Union more binding on its members than this "contact of alliance," 
which yet was to be "inviolably observed by every state;" more durable 
than the old Union, which yet was declared to be " perpetual." This great 
and beneficent change was a revolution — happily a peaceful revolution, 
the most important change probably ever brought about in a government 
without bloodshed. The new government was unanimously adopted by 
all the members of the old confederation, by some more promptly than by 
others, but by all within the space of four years. 

Much has been said against coercion — that is, the employment of force 
to compel obedience to the laws of the United States when they are resist- 
ed under the assumed authority of a state ; but even the old Confedera- 
tion, with all its weakness, in the opinion of the most eminent contempo- 
rary statesmen, possessed this power. Great stress is laid by politicians 
of the secession school on the fact, that in a project for amending the Ar- 
ticles of Confederation brought forward by judge Paterson in the federal 
convention, it was proposed to clothe the government with this power, and 
the proposal was not adopted. This is a very inaccurate statement of the 
facts of the case. The proposal formed part of a project which was re- 
jected in toto. The reason why this power of state coercion was not grant- 
ed co nomine, in the new constitution, is that it was wholly superfluous 
and inconsistent with the fundamental principle of the government. Within 
the sphere of its delegated powers the general government deals with 
the individual citizen. If its power is resisted the person or persons re- 
sisting it do so at their peril and are amenable to the law. They can de- 
rive no immunity from state legislatures or state conventions, because the 
constitution and laws of the United States are the supreme law of the land. 
If the resistance assumes an organized form, on the part of numbers too 
great to be restrained by the ordinary powers of the law, it is then an in- 
surrection, which the general government is expressly authorized to sup- 
press. Did any one imagine in 1793, when General Washington called 
out 15,000 men to suppress the insurrection in the western counties of 
Pennsylvania, that if the insurgents had happened to have the control of 
a majority of the legislature, and thus clothe their rebellion with a pretend- 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 15 

ed form of law, that he would have been obliged to disband his troops, and 
return himself baffled and discomfited to Mount Vernon ? If John Brown's 
raid at Harper's Ferry, instead of being the project of one misguided in- 
dividual and a dozen and a half deluded followers, had been the organized 
movement of the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, do the seceders hold 
that the United States would have had no right to protect Virginia, or 
punish the individuals concerned in her invasion ? Do the seceding states 
really mean after all, to deny that if a state law is passed to prevent the 
rendition of a fugitive slave, the general government has no right to employ 
force to effect his surrender ? 

But, as I have said, even the old confederation with all its weakness 
was held by the ablest contemporary statesman, and that of the state 
rights school, to possess the power of enforcing its requisitions against a 
delinquent state. Mr. Jefferson, in a letter to Mr. Adams of the 1 1th of 
July, 1186, on the subject of providing a naval force of 150 guns to 
chastise the Barbary powers, urges as an additional reason for such a 
step, that it would arm " the federal head with the safest of all the instru- 
ments of coercion over its delinquent members, and prevent it from using 
what would be less safe,", viz., a land force. Writing on the same subject 
to Mr. Monroe a month later (11th of August, 1786), he answers the 
objection of expense thus: "It will be said, 'There is no money in the 
Treasury.' There never will be money in the treasury, till the Confeder- 
acy shows its teeth. The states must see the rod, perhaps it must be felt 
by some of them. Every rational citizen must wish to see an effective 
instrument of coercion, and should fear to see it on any other element 
than the water. A naval force can never endanger our liberties, nor 
occasion bloodshed; a land force would do both." In the following year, 
• and when the confederation was at its last gasp, Mr. Jefferson was still of 
the opinion that it possessed the power of coercing the states, and that it 
was expedient to exercise it. In a letter to Colonel Carrington, of the 4th 
of April, 1*787, he says: # 

"It has been so often said as to be generally believed, that Congress 
have no power by the confederation to enforce any thing — for instance, 
contributions of money. It was not necessary to give them that power 
expressly — they have it by the law of nature. When two parties make a 
compact, there results to each the power of compelling the other to 
execute it. Compulsion was never so easy as in our case, when a single 
frigate would soon levy on the commerce of a single state the deficiency 
of its contributions." 

Such was Mr. Jefferson's opinion of the powers of Congress under 
the "old contract of alliance." Will any reasonable man maintain that 



16 THE GREAT ISSUES 

under a constitution of government there is less power to enforce the 
laws? 

But the cause of secession gains nothing by magnifying the doctrine of 
the sovereignty of the states, or calling the constitution a compact between 
them. Calling it a compact does not change a word of its text, and no 
theory of what is implied in the word " sovereignty" is of any weight in 
opposition to the actual provisions of the instrument itself; sovereignty is 
a word of very various signification. It is one tiling in China, another 
in Turkey, another in Russia, another in France, another in England, 
another in Switzerland, another in San Marino, another in the individual 
American states, and it is something different from all in the United 
States. To maintain that, because the state of Virginia, for instance, was 
in some sense or other a sovereign state, when her people adopted the 
federal constitution (which in terms was ordained and established not 
only for the people of that day but for their posterity), she may therefore 
at pleasure secede from the Union existing under that constitution, is 
simply to beg the question. That question is not, what was the theory 
or form of government existing in Virginia, before the constitution, but 
what are the provisions of the constitution which her people adopted and 
made their own ? Does the constitution of the United States permit or 
forbid the states to enter into any other confederation? Is it a mere 
loose partnership, which any of the parties can break up at pleasure ; or 
is it a constitution of government, delegating to Congress and prohibiting 
to the states most of the primal functions of a sovereign power ; — peace, 
war, commerce, finance, navy, army, mail, mint, executive, legislative, and 
judicial functions? The states are not named in it; the word sovereignty 
does not occur in it ; the right of secession is as much ignored in it as the 
precession of the Equinoxes, and all the great prerogatives which charac- 
terize an independent member of the family of nations are by distinct 
grant conferred on Congress by the people of the United States, and pro- 
hibited to the individual states of the Union. Is it not the height of 
absurdity to maintain that all these express grants and" distinct prohibi- 
tions, and constitutional arrangements, may be set at naught by an indi- 
vidual state, under the pretence, that she was a sovereign state before 
she assented to or ratified them ; in other words, that an act is of no 
binding force, because it was performed by an authorized and competent 
agent? 

In fact, to deduce from the sovereignty of the states the right of 
seceding from the Union is the most stupendous non sequitur that was 
ever advanced in grave affairs. The only legitimate inference to be drawn 
from that sovereignty is precisely the reverse. If any one right can be 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 17 

predicated of a sovereign state, it is that of forming or adopting a frame of 
government. She may do it alone or she may do it as a member of a 
union. She may enter into a loose pact for ten years, or till a partisan 
majority of a convention, goaded on by ambitious aspirants to office, shall 
vote in secret session to dissolve it; or she may, after grave deliberation 
and mature counsel, led by the wisest and most virtuous to the land, 
ratify and adopt a constitution of government, ordained and established 
not only for that generation, but their posterity, subject only to the 
inalienable right of revolution possessed by every political community. 

What would be thought in private affairs of a man who should seriously 
claim the right to revoke a grant, in consequence of having an unqualified 
right to make it? A right to break a contract, because he had a right to 
enter into it? To what extent is it more rational on the part of a state 
to found the right to dissolve the Union on the competence of the parties 
to form it; the right to prostrate a government on the fact that it was 
constitutionally framed ? 

But let us look at parallel cases, and they are by no means wanting. 
In the year 1800 a union was formed between England and Ireland. Ire- 
land, before she entered into the union, was subject indeed to the English 
crown, but she had her own parliament, consisting of her own lords and 
commons, and enacting her own laws. In 1800 she entered into a consti- 
tutional union with England on the basis of articles of agreement, jointly 
accepted by the two parliaments (Annual Register, XLII. p. 190). The 
union was opposed at the time by a powerful minority in Ireland, and Mr. 
O'Connell succeeded thirty years later, by ardent appeals to the sensibili- 
ties of the people, in producing an almost unanimous desire for its dissolu- 
tion. He professed, however, although he had wrought his countrymen 
to the verge of rebellion, to aim at nothing but a constitutional repeal of 
the articles of union by the parliament of Great Britain. It never occur- 
red even to his fervid imagination, that, because Ireland was an independ- 
ent government when she entered into the union, it was competent for her 
at her discretion to secede from it. What would our English friends who 
have learned from our secessionists the "inherent right" of a disaffected 
state to secede from our Union, have thought, had Mr. O'Connell, in the 
paroxysms of his agitation, claimed the right on the part of Ireland, by 
her own act, to sever her union with England? 

Again in 1706, Scotland and England formed a constitutional union. 
They also, though subject to the same monarch, were in other respects 
sovereign and independent kingdoms. They had each its separate parlia- 
ment, courts of justice, laws, and established national church. Articles of 
Union were established between them; but all the laws and statutes of 
2 



18 THE GREAT ISSUES 

either kingdom not contrary to these articles remained in force. (See the 
articles in Rapin IV. 741-6.) A powerful minority in Scotland disap- 
proved of the union at the time. Nine years afterward an insurrection 
broke out in Scotland under a prince, who claimed to be the lawful, as he 
certainly was the lineal, heir to the throne. The rebellion was crushed, 
but the disaffection in which it had its origin was not wholly appeased. 
In thirty years more a second Scottish insurrection took place, and as be- 
fore under the lead of the lineal heir to the crown. On neither occasion 
that I ever heard of, did it enter into the imagination of rebel or loyalist, 
that Scotland was acting under a reserved right as a sovereign kingdom, 
to secede from the Union, or that the movement was any thing less than 
an insurrection; revolution if it succeeded, treason and rebellion if it fail- 
ed. Neither do I recollect that, in less than a month after either insur- 
rection broke out, any one of the friendly anil neutral powers, made haste, 
in anticipation even of the arrival of the ministers of the reigning sover- 
eign, to announce that the rebels "would be recognized as belligerents." 

In fact it is so plain, in the nature of things, that there can be no con- 
stitutional right to break up a government unless it is expressly provided 
for, that the politicians of the secession school are driven back, at every 
turn, to a reserved right. I have already shown that there is no such ex- 
press reservation, and I have dwelt on the absurdity of getting by vmpii- 
cation a reserved right to violate every express provision of a constitution. 
In this strait, Virginia, proverbially skilled in logical subtleties, has at- 
tempted to find an express reservation, not of course in the constitution 
itself, where it does not exist, but in her original act of adhesion, or rather 
in the declaration of the " impressions" under which that act was adopted. 
The ratification itself, of Virginia, was positive and unconditional. " We, 
the said delegates, in the name and behalf of the people of Virginia, do, by 
these presents, assent to and ratify the constitution recommended on the 
17th day of September, 1787, by the federal convention, for the govern- 
ment of the United States, hereby announcing to all those whom it may 
concern, that the said constitution is binding upon the said people, accord- 
ing to an authentic copy hereunto annexed. Done in convention this 26th 
day of June, 1788." 

This, as you perceive, is an absolute and unconditional ratification of 
the constitution by the people of Virginia. An attempt, however, is made, 
by the late convention in Virginia, in their ordinance of secession, to ex- 
tract a reservation of a right to secede out of a declaration contained in 
the preamble to the act of ratification. That preamble declares it to be an 
•'impression" of the people of Virginia, that the powers granted under 
the constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 19 

be resumed by them, whenever the same shall be perverted to their in- 
jury or oppression. The ordinance of secession passed by the recent con- 
vention, purporting to cite this declaration, omits the words " by them," that 
is, by the people of the United States, not by the people of any single 
state, thus arrogating to the people of Virginia alone what the convention 
of 1788 claimed only, and that by way of "impression," for the people of 
the United States. 

By this most grave omission of the vital words of the sentence, the 
convention, I fear, intended to lead the incautious or the ignorant to the 
conclusion, that the convention of 1788 asserted the right of an individ- 
ual state to resume the powers granted in the constitution to the general 
government ; a claim for which there is not the slightest foundation in 
constitutional history. On the contrary, when the ill-omened doctrine of 
state nullification was sought to be sustained by the same argument in 
1830, and the famous Virginia resolutions of 1798 were appealed to by Mr.. 
Calhoun and his friends, as affording countenance to that doctrine, it was 
repeatedly and emphatically declared by Mr. Madison, the author of the 
resolutions, that they were intended to claim, not for an individual state, 
but for the United States, by whom the constitution was ordained and es- 
tablished, the right of remedying its abuses by constitutional ways, such 
as united protest, repeal, or an amendment of the constitution. (Maguire's 
Collection, p. 213.) Incidentally to the discussion of nullification he de- 
nied over and over again the right of peaceable secession ; and this fact 
was well known to some of the members of the late convention at Rich- 
mond. "When the secrets of their assembly are laid open, no doubt it will 
appear that there were some faithful Abdiels to proclaim the fact. Oh, 
that the venerable sage, second to none of his patriot compeers in framing 
the constitution, the equal associate of Hamilton in recommending it to the 
people; its great champion in the Virginia convention of 1788, and its 
faithful vindicator in 1830, against the deleterious heresy of nullification, 
could have been spared to protect it from the still deadlier venom of seces- 
sion ! But he is gone ; the principles, the traditions and the illustrious 
memories which gave to Virginia her name and her place in the laud, are 
no longer cherished ; the work of Washington, and Madison, and Ran- 
dolph, and Pendleton, and Marshall is repudiated, and nullifiers, precipita- 
tors and seceders gather in secret conclave to destroy the constitution in 
the very building that holds the monumental statue of the father of his 
country ! 

Having had occasion to allude to the Virginia resolutions of 1798, 1 may 
observe that of these famous resolves, the subject of so much political ro- 
mance, it is time that a little plain truth should be promulgated. The coun 



20 THE GREAT ISSUES 

try in 1798 was vehemently agitated by the struggles of the domestic parties 
which about equally divided it, and these struggles were urged to un- 
wonted and extreme bitterness by the preparations made and making for 
a war with France. By an act of Congress passed in the summer of that 
year, the President of the United States was clothed with power to send 
from the country any alien whom he might judge dangerous to the public 
peace and safety, or who should be concerned in any treasonable or secret 
machinations against the government of the United States. This act was 
passed as a war measure ; it was to be in force two years, and it expired 
by its own limitation on the 25th of June, 1800. War, it is true, had not 
been formally declared ; but hostilities on the ocean had taken place on 
both sides, and the army of the United States had been placed upon a 
war footing. The measure was certainly within the war power, and one 
which no prudent commander, even without the authority of a statute, 
would hesitate to execute in an urgent case within his own district. Con- 
gress thought fit to provide for and regulate its exercise by law. 

Two or three weeks later (July 14, 1798) another law was enacted, 
making it penal to combine or conspire with intent to oppose any lawful 
measure of the government of the United States, or to write, print or pub- 
lish any false and scandalous writing against the government, either 
House of Congress, or the President of the United States. In prosecu- 
tions under this law it was provided that the truth might be pleaded in 
justification, and that the jury should be judges of the law as well as of 
the fact. This law was, by its own limitation, to expire at the close of the 
then current presidential term. 

Such are the famous Alien and Sedition laws, passed under the admin- 
istration of that noble and true-hearted revolutionary patriot John Adams, 
though not recommended by him officially or privately ; adjudged to be 
constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, distinctly ap- 
proved by "Washington, Patrick Henry, and Marshall ; and, whatever else 
may be said of them, certainly preferable to the laws which, throughout 
the seceding states, Judge Lynch would not fail to enforce at the lamp- 
post and tar-bucket against any person guilty of the offences against which 
these statutes are aimed. 

It suited, however, the purposes of party at that time to raise a formi- 
dable clamor against these laws. It was in vain that their constitution- 
ality was affirmed by the judiciary of the United States. " Nothing," said 
Washington, alluding to these laws, "will produce the least change in the 
conduct of the leaders of the opposition to the measures of the general 
government. They have points to carry from which no reasoning, no in- 
consistency of conduct, no absurdity can divert them." Such, in the 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 21 

opinion of Washington, was the object for which the legislatures of Vir- 
ginia and Kentucky passed their famous resolutions of 1798, the former 
drafted by Mr. Madison, and the latter by Mr. Jefferson, and sent to a 
friend in Kentucky to be moved. These resolutions were transmitted to 
the other states for their concurrence. The replies from the states which 
made any response were referred to committees in Virginia and Kentucky. 
In the legislature of Virginia an elaborate report was made by Mr. Madi- 
son, explaining and defending the resolutions ; in Kentucky another re- 
solve reaffirming those of the preceding year was drafted by Mr. Wilson 
Cary Nicholas. Our respect for the distinguished men who took the lead 
on this occasion, then ardently engaged in the warfare of politics, must 
not make us fear to tell the truth, that the simple object of the entire 
movement was to make " political capital" for the approaching election, 
by holding up to the excited imaginations of the masses the Alien and Se- 
dition laws as an ini'raction of the constitution, which threatened the over- 
throw of the liberties of the people. The resolutions maintained that, the 
states being parties to the constitutional compact, in a case of deliberate, 
palpable and dangerous exercise of powers not granted by the compact, the 
states have a right and are in duty bound to interpose for preventing the 
progress of the evil. 

Such, in brief, was the main purport of the Virginia and Kentucky reso- 
lutions. The sort of interposition intended was left in studied obscurity. 
Not a word was dropped of secession from the Union. Mr. Nicholas's 
resolution in 1799 hinted at " nullification" as the appropriate remedy for 
an unconstitutional law, but what was meant by the ill-sounding word 
was not explained. The words "null, void and of no effect" contained in 
the original draft of the Virginia resolutions were stricken from them on 
their passage through the Assembly ; and Mr. Madison, in his report of 
1799, carefully explains that no extra-constitutional measures were in- 
tended. One of the Kentucky resolutions ends with an invitation to the 
states to unite in a petition to Congress to repeal the laws. 

These resolutions were communicated, as I have said, to the other 
states for concurrence. From most of them no response was received ; 
some adopted dissenting reports and resolutions ; not one concurred. But 
the resolutions did their work — all that they were intended or expected 
to do — by shaking the administration ; at the ensuing election, Mr. Jeffer- 
son, at whose instance the entire movement was made, was chosen Pres- 
ident by a very small majority ; Mr. Madison was placed at the head of 
his administration as Secretary of State ; the obnoxious laws expired by 
their own limitation, not repealed by the dominant party, as Mr. Calhoun 
with strange inadvertence asserts (Discourse on the Constitution, p. 359); 



22 THE GREAT ISSUES 

and Mr. Jefferson proceeded to administer the government upon constitu- 
tional principles quite as lax, to say the least, as those of his predecessors. 
If there was any marked departure in his general policy from the course 
hitherto pursued, it was that, having some theoretical prejudices against a 
navy, he allowed that branch of the service to languish. By no adminis- 
tration have the powers of the general government been more liberally 
construed — not to say further strained— -sometimes beneficially, as in the 
acquisition of Louisiana — sometimes perniciously as in the embargo. The 
resolutions of 1798 and the metaphysics they inculcated were surrendered 
to the cobwebs, which habitually await the plausible exaggerations of the 
canvass after an election is decided. These resolutions of 1798 have been 
usually waked from their slumbers at closely contested elections as a 
party cry ; the report of the Hartford Convention, without citing them by 
name, borrows their language ; but as representing in their modern inter- 
pretation any system on winch the government ever was or could be ad- 
ministered, they were buried in the same grave as the laws which called 
them forth. 

Unhappily during their transient vitality, like the butterfly which deposits 
his egg in the apple-blossoms that have so lately filled our orchards with 
beauty and perfume — a gilded harmless moth, whose food is a dew-drop 
whose life is a midsummer's day — these resolutions, misconceived and 
perverted, proved in the minds of ambitious and reckless politicians the' 
germ of a fatal heresy. The butterfly's egg is a microscopic speck, but as 
the fruit grows, the little speck gives life to a greedy and nauseous worm, 
that gnaws and bores to the heart of the apple, and renders it, though 
smooth and fair without, foul and bitter and rotten within. In like manner 
the theoretical generalities of these resolutions, intending nothing in the 
minds of their authors but constitutional efforts to procure the repeal of 
obnoxious laws, matured in the minds of a later generation into the deadly 
paradoxes of 1830 and 1860 — kindred products of the same soil; — the one 
asserting the monstrous absurdity that a state, though remaining in the 
Union, could by her single act nullify a law of Congress ; the other teach- 
ing the still more preposterous doctrine, that a single state may nullify the 
constitution. The first of these heresies failed to spread far beyond the 
latitude where it was engendered. In the Senate of the United States the 
great acuteness of its inventor, then the vico-president, and the accom- 
plished rhetoric of its champion (Mr. Hayne), failed to raise it above the 
level of a plausible sophism. It sunk forever discredited beneath the 
sturdy common sense and indomitable will of Jackson, the mature wisdom 
of Livingston, the keen analysis of Clay, and the crushing logic of Webster. 

Nor was this all: the venerable author of the resolutions of 1798 and 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 23 

of the report of 1799, was still living in a green old age. His connection 
with those state papers and still more his large participation in the forma- 
tion and adoption of the constitution, entitled him beyond all men living 
to be consulted on the subject. No effort was spared by the leaders of 
the nullification school to draw from him even a qualified assent to their 
theories. But in vain. He not only refused to admit their soundness, 
but he devoted his time ande nergies for three laborious years to the prep- 
aration of essays and letters, the object of which was to demonstrate that 
his resolutions and report did not and could not bear the Carolina inter- 
pretation. He earnestly maintained that the separate action of an indi- 
vidual state was not contemplated by them, and that they had in view 
nothing but the concerted action of the states to procure the repeal of un- 
constitutional laws or an amendment of the constitution.* 

With one such letter written with this intent, I was myself honored. 
It filled ten pages of the journal in which, with his permission, it was 
published. It unfolded the true theory of the constitution and the mean- 
ing and design of the resolution, and exposed the false gloss attempted to 
lie placed upon them, with a clearness and force of reasoning which defied 
refutation. None, to my knowledge, was ever attempted. The politicians 
of the nullification and secession school, as far as I am aware, have from 
that day to this made no attempt to grapple with Mr. Madison's letter of 
August, 1830. (North American Review, Vol. XXXI., p. 587.) Mr. Cal- 
houn certainly made no such attempt in the elaborate treatise composed 
by him, mainly for the purpose of expounding the doctrine of nullification. 
He claims the support of these resolutions without adverting to the fact 
that his interpretation of them had been repudiated by their illustrious 
author. He repeats his exploded paradoxes as confidently as if Mr. Madi- 
son himself had expired with the Alien and Sedition laws, and left no 
testimony to the meaning of his resolutions ; while, at the present day. 
with equal confidence, the same resolutions are appealed to by the disci- 
ples of Mr. Calhoun as sustaining the doctrine of secession, in the face of 
the positive declaration of their author, when that doctrine was first timidly 
broached, that they will bear no such interpretation. 

In this respect the disciples have gone beyond the master. There is a 
single sentence in Mr. Calhoun's elaborate volume in which he maintains 
the right of a state to secede from the Union. (Page 301.) There is 
reason to suppose, however, that he intended to claim only the inalienable 
right of revolution. In 1828 a declaration of political principles was 

* A very considerable portion of the important volume containing a selection from 
the Madison papers, and printed "exclusively for private distribution," by J. 0. 
McGuire, Esq., in 1853, is taken up with these letters ami essays. 



24 THE GREAT ISSUES 

drawn up by him for the state of South Carolina, in which it was ex- 
pressly taught, that the people of that state, by adopting the federal con- 
stitution had "modified its original right of sovereignty, whereby its individ- 
ual consent was necessary to any change in its political condition, and by 
becoming a member of the Union, had placed that power in the hands of 
three-fourths of the states [the number necessary for a constitutional 
amendment], in whom the highest power known to the constitution ac- 
tually resides." In a recent patriotic speech of Mr. Reverdy Johnson, at 
Frederick, Md., on the 7th of May, the distinct authority of Mr. Calhoun 
is quoted as late as 1844 against the right of separate action on the part 
of an individual state, and I am assured by the same respected gentleman, 
that it is within his personal knowledge, that Mr. Calhoun did not main- 
tain the peaceful right of secession. 

But it may be thought a waste of time to argue against a constitutional 
right of peaceful secession, since no one denies the right of revolution ; 
and no pains are spared by the disaffected leaders, while they claim in- 
deed the constitutional right, to represent their movement as the uprising 
of an indignant people against an oppressive and tyrannical govern- 
ment. 

An oppressive and tyrannical government ! Let us examine this pre- 
tence for a few moments, first in the general and then in the detail of its 
alleged tyrannies and abuses. 

This oppressive and tyrannical government is the successful solution of 
a problem which had tasked the sagacity of mankind from the dawn of 
civilization ; viz. : to find a form of polity by which institutions purely 
popular could be extended over a vast empire, free alike from despotic 
centralization and undue preponderance of the local powers. It was ne- 
cessarily a complex system, a Union at once federal and national. It 
leaves to the separate states the control of all matters of purely local ad- 
ministration, and confides to the central power the management of foreign 
affairs and of all other concerns in which the united family have a joint 
interest. All the organized and delegated powers depend directly or very 
nearly so on popular choice. This government was not imposed upon the 
people by a foreign conqueror ; it is not an inheritance descending from 
barbarous ages, laden with traditionary abuses, which create a painful 
ever- recurring necessity of reform ; it is not the conceit of heated enthu- 
siasts in the spasms of a revolution. It is the recent and voluntary frame- 
work of an enlightened age, compacted by wise and good men, with delib- 
eration and care, working upon materials prepared by long colonial disci- 
pline. In framing it they sought to combine the merits and to avoid the 
defects of former systems of government. The greatest possible liberty of 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 25 

the citizen is the basis ; just representation the ruling principle, reconcil- 
ing with rare ingenuity the federal equality of the states with the propor- 
tionate influence of numbers. Its legislative and executive magistrates 
are freely chosen at short periods ; its judiciary alone holding office by a 
more permanent but still sufficiently responsible tenure. No money flows 
into or out of the treasury but under the direct sanction of the represen- 
tatives of the people, on whom also all the great functions of the govern- 
ment for peace and war, within the limits already indicated, are devolved. 
No hereditary titles or privileges ; no distinction of ranks, no established 
church, no courts of high commission are known to the system ; not a 
drop of blood has ever flowed under its authority for a political offence ; 
but this tyrannical and oppressive government has certainly exhibited a 
more perfect development of equal republican principles than has ever be- 
fore existed on any considerable scale. Under its benign influence the 
country, every part of the country, has prospered beyond all former ex- 
ample. Its population lias increased ; its commerce, agriculture and man- 
ufactures have flourished ; manners, arts, education, letters, all that dig- 
nifies and ennobles man, have in a shorter period attained a higher point 
of cultivation than has ever before been witnessed in a newly-settled 
region. The consequence has been consideration and influence abroad and 
marvellous well-being at home. The world has looked with admiration 
upon the country's progress ; we have ourselves contemplated it perhaps 
with undue self-complacercj r . Armies without conscription ; navies with- 
out impressment, and neither army nor navy swelled to an oppressive size ; 
an overflowing treasury without direct taxation or oppressive taxation of 
any kind ; churches without number and with no denominational prefer- 
ences on the part of the state ; schools and colleges accessible to all the 
people ; a free and a cheap press ; all the great institutions of social life 
extending their benefits to the mass of the community. Such, no one can 
deny, is the general character of this oppressive and tyrannical govern- 
ment. 

But perhaps this government, however wisely planned, however ben- 
eficial even in its operation, may have been rendered distasteful, or may 
have become oppressive in one part of the country and to one portion of 
the people, in consequence of the control of affairs having been monopo- 
lized or unequally shared by another portion. In a confederacy the 
people of one section are not well pleased to be even mildly governed 
by an exclusive domination of the other. Iu point of fact this is the 
allegation, the persistent allegation of the South, that from the founda- 
tion of the government it has been wielded by the people of the Ncvth 
for their special, often exclusive benefit, and to the injury and oppres- 



26 THE GREAT ISSUES 

sion of the South. Let us see. Out of seventy-two years since the or- 
ganization of the government, the executive chair has for sixty-four 
years been filled nearly all the time by Southern Presidents, and when 
that was not the case, by Presidents possessing the confidence of the 
South. For a still longer period the controlling influence of the legisla- 
tive and judicial departments of the government have centred in the 
same quarter. Of all the offices in the gift of the central power in 
every department, far more than her proportionate share has always 
been enjoyed by the South. She is at this moment revolting against 
a government, not only admtted to be the mildest and most beneficent 
ever organized this side Utopia, but one which she has herself from the 
first almost monopolized. 

But are there no wrongs, abuses and oppressions alleged to have 
been suffered by the South, which have rendered her longer submission 
to the federal government intolerable, and which are pleaded as the 
motive and justification of the revolt? Of course there are, but with 
such variation and uncertainty of statement as to render their examin- 
ation difficult. The manifesto of South Carolina of the 20th December 
last, which led the way in this inauspicious movement, sets forth nothing 
but the passage of state laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive 
slaves. The document does not state that South Carolina herself ever 
lost a slave in consequence of these laws ; it is not probable she ever 
did, and yet she makes the existence of these laws, which are wholly 
inoperative as far as she is concerned, and which probably never caused 
to the entire South the loss of a dozen fugitives, the ground for break- 
ing up the Union and plunging the country into a civil war. But I 
shall presently revert to this topic. 

Other statements in other quarters enlarge the list of grievances. 
In the month of November, after the result of the election was ascer- 
tained, a very interesting discussion of the subject of secession took 
place at Milledgeville, before the members of the legislature of Georgia 
and the citizens generally, between two gentlemen of great ability 
and eminence, since elected, the one Secretary of State, and the other 
Vice-President of the new confederacy; the former urging the necessitjr 
and duty of immediate secession — the latter opposing it. I take the 
grievances and abuses of the federal government, which the South has 
suffered at the hands of the North, and which were urged by the former 
speaker as the grounds of secession, as I find them stated and answered 
by his friend and fellow-citizen (then opposed to secession) according to 
the report in the Milledgeville papers. 

And what think you, was the grievance in the front rank of those op- 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 



27 



pressions on the part of the North which have driven the long suffering 
and patient Sonth to open rebellion against "the best government that 
the history of the world gives any account of ?" It was not that upon 
which the convention of South Carolina relied. You will hardly believe 
it; posterity will surely not believe it. ^¥e listened said Mr. Vice- 
President Stephens in his reply, " to my honorable friend last night (Mr. 
Toombs), as he recounted the evils of this government. The first was the 
fishing bounties paid mostly to the sailors of New England." The bounty 
paid by the federal government to encourage the deep-sea fisheries of the 
United States ! 

You are aware that this laborious branch of industry has by all ma- 
ritime states been ever regarded with special favor as the nursery of 
naval power. The fisheries of the American colonies before the Ameri- 
can Revolution drew from Burke one of the most gorgeous bursts of elo- 
quence in our language — in any language. They were all but annihilated 
by the revolution, but they furnished the men who followed Manly, and 
Tucker, and Biddle, and Paul Jones to the jaws of death. Reviving after 
the war, they attracted the notice of the first Congress, and were re- 
commended to their favor by Mr. Jefferson, then Secretary of State. This 
favor was at first extended to them in the shape of a drawback of the 
duty on the various imported articles employed in the building and outfit 
of vessels and on the foreign salt used in preserving the fish. The com- 
plexity of this arrangement led to the substitution at first of a certain 
bounty on the quantity of fish exported ; subsequently on the tonnage of 
the vessels employed in the fisheries. All administrations have con- 
curred in the measure ; Presidents of all parties — though there has not 
been much variety of party in that office — have approved the appropria- 
tions. If the North has a local interest in these bounties, the South 
got the principal food of her laboring population so much the cheaper ; 
and she had her common share in the protection which the navy afforded 
her coasts, and in the glory which it shed on the flag of the country. 
But since, unfortunately, the deep-sea fisheries do not exist in the Gulf 
of Mexico, nor, as in the "age of Pyrrha," on the top of the Blue Ridge, 
it has been discovered of late years, that these bounties are a violation 
of the constitution ; a largess bestowed by the common treasury on one 
section of the country, and not shared by the other; one of the hundred 
ways, in a word, in which the rapacious North is fattening upon the op- 
pressed and pillaged South. You will naturally wish to know the 
amount of this tyrannical and oppressive bounty. It is stated by a sen- 
ator from Alabama (Mr. Clay), who has warred against it with persever- 
ance and zeal, and succeeded in the last Congress in carrying a bill through 



28 THE GREAT ISSUES 

the Senate for its repeal, to have amounted, on the average, to an annual 
sura of $200,005. Such is the portentous grievance which in Georgia 
stands at the head of the acts of oppression, for which, although re- 
pealed in one branch of Congress, the Union is to be broken up and the 
co untry desolated by war. . Switzerland revolted because an Austrian 
tyrant invaded the sanctity of her firesides, and compelled her fathers 
to shoot apples from the heads of her sons ; the Low Countries revolted 
against the fires of the Inquisition ; our fathers revolted because they 
were taxed by a parliament in which they were not represented ; the 
cotton states revolt because a paltry subvention is paid to the haidy 
fishermen who form the nerve and muscle of the American navy. 

But it is, not, we shall be told, the amount of the bounty, but the prin- 
ciple, as our fathers revolted against a three-penny tax on tea. But that 
was because it was laid by a parliament in which the colonies were not 
represented, and which yet claimed the right to bind them in all cases. 
The fishing bounty is bestowed by a government which has been from the 
first controlled by the South. Then how unreasonable to expect or to 
wish, that, in a country so vast as ours, no public expenditure should be 
made for the immediate benefit for one part or one interest that cannot be 
identically repeated in every other. A liberal policy, or rather the neces- 
sity of the case, demands, that whatthe public good, upon the whole, re- 
quires, should under constitutional limitations be done where it is required, 
offsetting the local benefit which may accrue from the expenditure made 
in one place and for one object, with the local benefit from the same source, 
in some other place for some other object. More money was expended by 
the United States in removing the Indians from Georgia — eight or ten 
times as much was expended for the same object in Florida — as has been 
paid for fishing bounties in seventy years. For the last year, to pay for 
the expense of the post-office in the seceding states, and enable our fellow- 
citizens there to enjoy the comforts of a newspaper and letter mail to the 
same extent as they are enjoyed in the other states, three and a half mil- 
lions of dollars were paid from the common treasury. The post-office 
bouuty paid to the seceding states exceeded seventeen-fold the annual 
average amount of the fishing bounty paid to the North. In four years 
that excess would equal the sum total of the amount paid since 1792 in 
bounties to the deep-sea fishery 1 

The second of the grievances under which the South is laboring, and 
which, according to Mr. Stephens, was, on the occasion alluded to, pleaded 
by the Secretary of State of the seceding states as a ground for dissolving 
the Union, is the navigation laws, which give to American vessels the 
exclusive enjoyment of our own coasting trade. This also is a policy 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 29 

coeval with the government of the United States, and universally adopted 
by maritime powers, though relaxed by England within the last few 
years. Like the fishing bounty it is a policy adopted for the purpose of 
fostering the commercial and with that the naval marine of the United 
States. All administrations of all parties have favored it ; under its influ- 
ence our commercial tonnage has grown up to be second to no other in the 
world, and our navy has proved itself adecpiate to all the exigencies of 
peace and war. And are these no objects in a national point of view? 
Are the seceding statesmen really insensible to interests of such a para- 
mount national importance ? Can they, for the sake of an imaginary infi- 
nitessimal reduction of coastwise freights, be willing to run even the risk 
of imparing our naval prosperity? Are they insensible to the fact that 
nothing but the growth of the American commercial marine protects the 
entire freighting interest of the country, in which the South is more deeply 
interested than the North, from European monopoly ? The South did not 
always take so narrow a view of the subject. When the constitution was 
framed, and the American merchant marine was inconsiderable, the dis- 
crimination in favor of the United States vessels, which then extended to 
the foreign trade, was an object of some apprehension on the part of the 
planting states. But there were statesmen in the South at that day who 
did not regard the shipping interest as a local concern. " So far," said Mr. 
Edward Rutledge, in the South Carolina Convention of 17S8, "from not 
preferring the Northern states by a navigation act, it would be politic to 
increase their strength by every means in our power ; for we had no other 
resource in our days of danger than in the naval force of our northern 
friends, nor could we ever expect to become a great nation till we were 
powerful on the waters." (Elliott's Debates, IV., 299.) But "powerful 
on the waters" the South can never be. She has live-oak, naval stores, 
and gallant officers ; but her climate and its diseases, the bars at the mouth 
of nearly all her harbors, the teredo, the want of a merchant marine and 
of fisheries, and the character of her laboring population, will forever pre- 
vent her becoming a great naval power. Without the protection of the 
. navy of the United States, she would hold the ingress and egress of every 
port on her coast at the mercy, I will not say of the great maritime states 
of Europe; but of Holland, Denmark, and Austria, and Spain — of any 
second or third rate power, which can keep a few steam-frigates at sea. 

It must be confessed, however, that there is a sad congruity between 
the conduct of our seceding fellow-citizens and the motives which they 
assign for it. They attempt a suicidal separation of themselves from a 
great naval power, of .which they are now an integral part, and they put 
forward as the reason for this self-destructive course, the legislative meaa- 



30 THE GREAT ISSUES 

ares which have contributed to the growth of the navy. A judicious pol- 
icy designed to promote that end lias built up the commercial and military 
marine of the Union to its present commanding stature and power; the 

South, though unable to contribute any thing to its prosperity but the serv- 
ices of her naval officers, enjoys her full share of the honor which it reflects 
on the country ; and the protection which it extends to our flag, our coasts, 
and our commerce, but under the influence of a narrow-minded sectional 
jealousy, is willing to abdicate the noble position which she now fills 
among the nations of the earth; to depend for her very existence on the 
exigencies of the cotton market, to live upon the tolerance of the navies 
of Europe, and she assigns as leading causes for this amazing fatuity, that 
the northern fisheries have been encouraged by a trifling bounty, and that 
the northern commercial marine has the monopoly of the coastwise trade. 
And the politicians, who, for reasons like these, almost too frivolous to 
merit the time we have devoted to their examination, are sapping a noble 
framework of government, and drenching a fair and but for them prosper- 
ous country in blood, appeal to the public opinion of mankind for the jus- 
tice of their cause and the purity of their motives, and lift their eyes to 
heaven for a blessing on their arms ! 

But the tariff is — with one exception — the alleged monster wrong for 
which South Carolina in 1832 drove the Union to the verge of a civil war, 
and which, next to the slavery question, the South has been taught to 
regard as the most grievous of the oppressions which she suffers at the 
hands of the North, and that by which she seeks to win the sympathy of 
the manufacturing states of Europe. I am certainly not going so far to 
abuse your patience as to enter into a discussion of the constitutionality 
or expediency of the protective policy, on which I am aware that opinions 
at the North differ, nor do I deem it necessary to expose the utter fallacy 
of the stupendous paradox, that duties, enhancing the price of imported 
articles, are paid, not by the consumer of the merchandise imported, but 
by the producer of the last article of export given in exchange. It is 
sufficient to say that for this maxim (the forty-bale theory so called), which 
has grown into an article of faith at the South, not the slightest authority 
ever has been, to my knowledge, adduced from any political economist of 
any school. Indeed, it can be shown to be a shallow sophism, inasmuch 
as the consumer must be the producer of the equivalents given in ex- 
change for the article he consumes. But without entering into this dis- 
cussion, I shall make a few remarks to show the great injustice of repre- 
senting the protective system as being in its origin an oppression, of 
which the South has to complain on the part of the North. 

Every such suggestion is a complete inversion of the truth of history. 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 31 

Some attempts at manufactures by machinery were made at the North 
before the Revolution, but to an inconsiderable extent. The manufactur- 
ing system as a great northern interest is the child of the restrictive policy 
of 1807-1812, and of the war. That policy was pursued against the earnest 
opposition of the North, and the temporary prostration of their commerce, 
navigation and fisheries. Their capital was driven in this way into man- 
ufactures, and on the return of peace the foundations of the protective 
system were laid in the square-yard duty on cotton fabrics, in the support 
of which Mr. Calhoun, advised that the growth of the manufacture would 
open a new market for the staple of the South, took the lead. As late as 
1821 the legislature of South Carolina unanimously affirmed the constitu- 
tionality of protective duties — and of all the states of the Union Louisiana 
has derived the greatest benefit from this policy; in fact she owes the 
sugar culture to it, and has for that reason given it her steady support. 
In all the tariff battles while I was a member of Congress, few votes were 
surer for the policy than that of Louisiana. If the duty on an article im- 
ported is considered as added to its price in our market (which, however, 
is far from being invariably the case), the sugar duty of late has amounted 
to a tax of live millions of dollars annually paid by the consumer for the 
benefit of the Louisiana planter. 

As to its being an unconstitutional policy, it is perfectly well known 
that the protection of manufactures was a leading and avowed object for 
the formation of the constitution. The second law passed by Congress 
after its formation was a revenue law. Its preamble is as follows: 
" Whereas it is necessary for the support of government, for the discharge 
of the debts of the United States, and the encouragement and protection 
of manufactures, that duties be laid on goods, wares and merchandise 
imported." That act was reported to the House of Representatives by Mr. 
Madison, who is entitled as much as any one to be called the father of the 
constitution. While it was pending before the house, and in the first 
week of the first session of the first Congress two memorials were pre- 
sented, praying for protective duties ; and it is a matter of some curiosity 
to inquire from what part of the country this first call came for that policy, 
now r put forward as one of the acts of Northern oppression which justify 
the South in flying to arms. The first of these petitions was from Balti- 
more. It implored the new government to lay a protecting duty on all 
articles imported from abroad which can be manufactured at home; the 
second was from the shipwrights of Charleston. South Carolina, jjraying 
for such a general regulation of trade, and the establishment of such a 
navigation act as will relieve the particular distresses of the petitioners, 
in common with those of their fellow-shipwrights throughout the Union 1 



32 THE GREAT ISSUES 

But the history of the great Southern staple is most curious and instruc- 
tive. His majesty "King Cotton," on his throne, does not seem to be 
aware of the influences which surrounded his cradle. The culture of 
cotton, on any considerable scale, is well known to be of recent date in 
America. The household manufacture of cotton was coeval with the set- 
tlement of the country. A century before the piano-forte or the harp was 
seen on this continent, the music of the spinning-wheel was heard at every 
fireside in town and country. The raw materials were wool, flax, and 
cotton, the last imported from the West Indies. The colonial system of 
Great Britain before the Revolution forbade the establishment of any other 
than household manufactures. Soon after the Revolution, cotton mills 
were erected in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and the infant manufac- 
ture was encouraged by state duties on the imported fabric. The raw 
material was still derived exclusively from the West Indies. Its culture 
in this country was so extremely limited and so little known that a small 
parcel sent from the United States to Liverpool in 1784 was seized at the 
custom-house there as an illicit importation of British colonial produce. 
Even as late as 1794, and by persons so intelligent as the negotiators of 
Jay's treaty, it was not known that cotton was an article of growth and 
export from the United States. In the twelfth article of that treaty, as 
laid before the Senate, cotton was included with molasses, sugar, coffee, 
and cocoa, as articles which American vessels should not be permitted to 
carry from the islands, or from the United States to any foreign country. 

In the revenue law of 1790 as it passed through the House of Repre- 
sentatives, cotton with other raw materials was placed on the free list. 
When the bill reached the Senate a duty of three cents per pound was 
laid upon cotton, not to encourage, not to protect, but to create the domes- 
tic culture. On the discussion of this amendment in the House, a mem- 
ber from South Carolina declared that "cotton was in contemplation" in 
South Carolina and Georgia, "and if good seed could be procured he. hoped 
it might succeed." On this hope the amendment of the Senate was con- 
curred in, and the duty of three cents per pound was laid on cotton. In 
1791 Hamilton, in his report on manufactures, recommended the repeal of 
this duty, on the ground that it was "a very serious impediment to the 
manufacture of cotton," but his recommendation was disregarded. 

Thus in the infancy of the cotton manufactures of the North, at the mo- 
ment when they were deprived of the protection extended to them before 
the constitution by state laws, and while they were struggling against 
English competition under the rapidly improving machinery of Arkwright, 
which it was highly penal to export to foreign countries, a heavy burden 
was laid upon them by this protecting duty, to enable the planters of South 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 33 

Carolina and Georgia to explore the tropics, for a variety of cotton-seed 
adapted to their climate. For seven years at least, and probably more, 
this duty was in every sense of the word a protecting duty. There was 
not a pound of cotton spun, no not for candlewicks to light the humble in- 
dustry of the cottages of the North, which did not pay this tribute to the 
Southern planter. The growth of the native article, as we have seen, 
had not in 1794 reached a point to be known to Chief- Justice Jay as one 
of actual or probable export. As late as 1796, the manufacturers of Bran- 
dywine in Delaware petitioned Congress for the repeal of this duty on im- 
ported cotton, and the petition was rejected on the report of a committee, 
consisting of a majority from the Southern states, on the ground that " to 
repeal the duty on raw cotton imported would be to damp the growth of 
cotton in our own country." Radicle and plumule, root and branch, blos- 
som and boll, the culture of the cotton-plant in the United States was, in 
its infanc3 r , the foster-child of the protective system. 

When therefore, the pedigree of " king cotton" is traced, he is found to be 
the lineal child of the tariff; called into being by a specific duty ; reared 
by a tax laid upon the manufacturing industry of the North, to create the 
culture of the raw material in the South. The northern manufactures of 
America were slightly protected in 1789, because they were too feeble to 
stand alone. Reared into magnitude under the restrictive system and the 
war of 1812, they were upheld in 1816 because they were too important 
to be sacrificed, and because the great staple of the South had a joint in- 
terest in their prosperity. King cotton alone, not in his manhood, nor in 
his adolescence, not in his infancy, but in his very embryo state, was pen- 
sioned upon the treasury — before the seed from which he sprang was cast 
"in the lowest parts of the earth." In the book of the tariff "his mem- 
bers were written, which were fashioned in countenance, when as yet 
there were none of them." 

But it was not enough to create the culture of cotton at the South, by 
taxing the manufactures of the North with a duty on the raw material, 
the extension of that culture and the prosperity which it has conferred 
upon the South are due to the mechanical genius of the North. What 
says Mr. Justice Johnson of the Supreme Court of the United States, and 
a citizen of South Carolina? "With regard to the utility of this dis- 
covery" (the cotton-gin of Whitney), " the court would deem it a waste of 
time to dwell long upon this topic. Is there a man who hears us that has 
not experienced its utility ? The whole interior of the Southern states 
was languishing and its inhabitants emigrating for want of some object to 
engage their attention and employ their industry, when the invention of 
this machine at once opened views to them which set the whole country 
3 



34 THE GREAT ISSUES 

in active motion. From childhood to age it has presented us a lucrative 
employment. Individuals who are depressed in poverty and sunk in idle- 
ness, have suddenly risen to wealth and respectability. Our debts have 
been paid off; our capitals increased, and our lands trebled in value. "We 
cannot express the weight of obligation which the country owes to this 
invention ; the extent of it cannot now be seen." Yes, and when happier 
days shall return, and the South, awakening from her suicidal delusion, 
shall remember who it was that sowed her sunny fields with the seeds of 
those golden crops with which she thinks to rule the world, she will cast 
a veil of oblivion over the memory of the ambitious men who have goad- 
ed her to her present madness, and will rear a monument of her gratitude 
in the beautiful City of Elms, over the ashes of her greatest benefactor — 
Eli Whitney. 

But the great complaint of the South, and that which is admitted to be 
the occasion of the present revolt, is the alleged interference of the North 
in the Southern institution of slavery ; a subject on which the sensibilities 
of the two sections have been so deeply and fearfully stirred, -that it is 
nearly impossible to speak words of impartial truth. As I have already 
stated, the declaration by South Carolina, of the causes which prompted 
her to secede from the Union, alleged no other reason for this movement 
than the enactment of laws to obstruct the surrender of fugitive slaves. 
The declaration does not state that South Carolina ever lost a slave by 
the operation of these laws, and it is doubtful whether a dozen from all 
the states have been lost from this cause. A gross error on this subject 
pervades the popular mind at the South. Some hundreds of slaves in the 
aggregate escape annually ; some to the recesses of the Dismal Swamp ; 
some to the everglades of Florida; some to the trackless mountain region 
which traverses the South; some to the Mexican states and the Indian 
tribes ; some across the free states to Canada. The popular feeling of the 
South ascribes the entire loss to the laws of the free states ; while it is 
doubtful whether these laws cause any portion of it. The public senti- 
ment of the North is not such, of course, as to dispose the community to 
obstruct the escape or aid the surrender of slaves. Neither is it at the 
South. 

No one, I am told, at the South, not called upon by official duty, joins in 
the hue and cry after a fugitive ; and whenever he escapes from any state 
south of the border tier, it its evident that his flight must have been aided 
in a community of slaveholders. If the North Carolina fugitive escapes 
through Virginia, or the Tennessee fugitive escapes through Kentucky, 
why arc Pennsylvania and Ohio alone blamed? On this whole subject 
the grossest injustice is done to the North. She is expected to be more 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 35 

tolerant of slavery than the South herself; for while the South demands 
of the North entire acquiescence in the extrernest doctrines of slave prop- 
erty, it is a well known fact, and as such alluded to by Mr. Clay in his 
speech on the compromises of 1850, that any man who habitually traffics 
in this property is held in the same infamy at Richmond and New Orleans 
that he would be at Philadelphia or Cincinnati. 

While South Carolina, assigning the cause of secession, confines herself 
to the state laws for obstructing the surrender of fugitives, in other quar- 
ters, by the press, in the manifestoes and debates on the subject of seces- 
sion, and in the official papers of the new confederacy, the general conduct 
of the North, with respect to slavery, is put forward as the justifying, nay 
the compelling cause of the revolution. This subject, still more than that 
of the tariff, is too trite for discussion, with the hope of saying any thing- 
new on the general question. I will but submit a few considerations to 
show the great injustice which is done to the North, by representing her 
as the aggressor in this sectional warfare. 

The Southern theory assumes that, at the time of the* adoption of the 
constitution, the same antagonism prevailed as now between the North 
and South, on the general subject of slavery ; that although it existed to 
some extent in all the states but one of the Union, it was a feeble and de- 
clining interest at the North, and mainly seated at the South ; that the 
soil and climate of the North were soon found to be unpropitious to slave 
labor, while the reverse was the case at the South ; that the Northern 
states, in consequence, having from interested motives abolished slavery, 
sold their slaves to the South, and that then, although the existence of 
slavery was recognized and its protection guarantied by the constitution, 
as soon as the Northern states had acquired a controlling voice in Con- 
gress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures, against the 
rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern states, was inaugurated and 
gradually extended, in violation of the compromises of the constitution, as 
well as of the honor and good faith tacitly pledged to the South, by the 
manner in which the North disposed of her slaves. 

Such, in substance, is the statement of Mr. Davis in his late message, and 
he then proceeds, seemingly as if rehearsing the acts of this northern ma- 
jority in Congress, to refer to the anti-slavery measures of the state legis- 
tures, to the resolutions of abolition societies, to the passionate appeals of 
the party pie,-.-, and to the acts of lawless individuals during the progress 
of this unhappy agitation. 

Now this entire view of the subject, with whatever boldness it is af- 
firmed, and with whatever persistency it is repeated, is destitute of foun- 
dation. It is demonstrably at war with the truth of history, and is con- 



36 THE GREAT ISSUES 

tradicted by facts known to those now on the stage, or which are matters 
of recent record. At the time of the adoption of the constitution, and long 
afterwards, there was, generally speaking, no sectional difference of opin- 
ion between North and South on the subject of slavery. It was in both 
parts of the country regarded, in the established formula of the day, "as a 
social, political and moral evil." The general feeling in favor of universal 
liberty and the rights of man, wrought into fervor in the progress of the 
revolution, naturally strengthened the anti-slavery sentiment throughout 
the Union. It is the South which has since changed, not the North. The 
theory of a change in the Northern mind, growing out of a discovery made 
soon after 1789, that our soil and climate were unpropitious to slavery (as 
if the soil and climate then were different from what they had always 
been), and a consequent sale to the South of the slaves of the North, is 
purely mythical ; as groundless in fact as it is absurd in statement. I 
have often asked for the evidence of this last allegation, and I have never 
found an individual who attempted even to prove it. ■ But however this 
may be, the Soutii at that time regarded slavery as an evil, though a ne- 
cessary one, and habitually spoke of it in that light. Its continued exist- 
ence was supposed to depend upon keeping up the African slave-trade ; 
and South as well as North, Virginia as well as Massachusetts, passed 
laws to prohibit that traffic; they were, however, before the Revolution, 
vetoed by the royal governors. One of the first acts of the Continental 
Congress, unanimously subscribed by its members, was an agreement nei- 
ther to import nor purchase any slave imported after the first of Decem- 
ber, 1774. In the Declaration of Independence, as originally drafted by 
Mr. Jefferson, both slavery and the slave-trade were denounced in the 
most uncompromising language. In 1777 the traffic was forbidden in Vir- 
ginia by state law, no longer subject to the veto of royal governors. In 
1784 an ordinance was reported by Mr. Jefferson to the old Congress, pro- 
viding that after 1800 there should be no slavery in" any territory ceded or 
to be ceded to the United States. The ordinance failed at that time to be 
enacted, but the same prohibition formed a part, by general consent, of 
the ordinance of 1787 for the organization of the Northwestern territory. 
In his Null's cm Virginia, published in that year, Mr. Jefferson depicted 
the evils of slavery in terms of fearful import. In the same year the con- 
stitution was framed. It recognized the existence of slavery, but the 
word was carefully excluded from the instrument, and Congress was au- 
thorized to abolish the traffic in twenty years. In 1790, Mr. St. George 
Tucker. Law Professor in William and Mary College in Virginia, publish- 
ed a treatise entitled "Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, Ded- 
icated to the General Assembly of the people of Virginia." In the preface 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 



37 



to the essay he speaks of the "abolition of slavery in this state as an ob- 
ject of the first importance, not only to our moral and domestic peace, but 
even to our political salvation." In 1797 Mr. Pinckney, in the legislature 
of Maryland, maintained that "by the eternal principles of justice no man 
in the state has the right to hold his slave a single hour." In 1803, Mr. 
John Randolph, from a committee on the subject, reported that "the prohi- 
bition of slavery by the ordinance of 1787 was wisely calculated to promote 
the happiness and prosperity of the northwestern states and to give 
strength and security to that extensive frontier." Under Mr. Jefferson, 
the importation of slaves into the territories of Mississippi and Louisiana 
was prohibited in advance of the time limited by the constitution for the 
interdiction of the slave-trade. When the Missouri restriction was enact- 
ed, all the members of Mr. Monroe's cabinet — Mr. Crawford, Mr. Calhoun 
and Mr. Wirt — concurred with Mr. Monroe in affirming its constitutional- 
ity. In 1832, after the Southampton Massacre, the evils of slavery were 
exposed in the legislature of Virginia, and the expediency of its gradual 
abolition maintained, in terms as decided as were ever employed by the 
most uncompromising agitator. A bill for that object was introduced into 
the Assembly by the grandson of Mr .Jefferson, and warmly supported 
by distinguished politicians now on the stage. Nay, we have the recent 
admission of the Vice-President of the seceding confederacy, that what he 
calls "the errors of the past generation," meaning the anti-slavery senti- 
ments entertained by Southern statesmen, "still clung to many as late as 
twenty years ago." 

To this hasty review of Southern opinions and measures, showing their 
accordance till a late date with Northern sentiment on the subject of 
slavery, I might add the testimony of Washington, of Patrick Henry, of 
George Mason, of Wythe, of Pendleton, of Marshall, of Lowndes, of Poin- 
sett, of Clay, and of nearly every first-class name in the Southern states. 
Nay, as late as 1849, and after the Union had been shaken by the agi- 
tations incident to the acquisition of Mexican territory, the convention 
of California, although nearly one half of its members were from the 
slaveholding states, unanimously adopted a constitution by which slavery 
was prohibited in that state. In fact it is now triumphantly proclaimed 
by the chiefs of the revolt, that the ideas prevailing on this subject when 
the constitution was adopted are fundamentally wrong; that the new 
government of the Confederate States " rests upon exactly the opposite 
ideas ; that its foundations are laid and its corner-stone reposes upon the 
great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — 
subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. 
Thus our new government is the first in the history of the world based 



38 THE GREAT ISSUES 

upon this physical, philosophical and moral truth." So little foundation is 
there for the statement that the North, from the first, has been engaged 
in a struggle with the South on the subject of slavery, or has departed in 
any degree from the spirit with which the Union was entered into by both 
parties, the fact is precisely the reverse. 

Mr. Davis, in his message to the Confederate States, goes over a long 
list of measures which he declares to have been inaugurated, and gradually 
extended, aj soon as the northern states had reached a sufficient number 
to give their representatives a controlling voice in Congress. But of all 
those measures not one is a matter of Congressional legislation, nor has 
Congress, with this alleged controlling voice on the part of the North, 
ever either passed a law hostile to the interests of the South, on the 
subject of slavery, or failed to pass one which the South has claimed as 
belonging to her rights or needed for her safety. In truth, the anti- 
slavery North never has had the control of both houses of Congress, 
never of the judiciary, rarely of the executive, and never exerted these to 
the prejudice of Southern rights. Every judicial or legislative issue on 
this question, with the single exception of the final admission of Kansas, 
that has ever been raised before Congress, has been decided in favor of 
the South, and yet she allows herself to allege "a persistent and organ- 
ized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves" 
as the justification of her rebellion. 

The hostile measures alluded to are, as I have said, none of them 
matters of Congressional legislation. Some of them are purely imaginary 
as to any injurious effect, others much exaggerated, others unavoidably 
incident to freedom of speech and the press. You are aware, my friends, 
that I have always disapproved the agitation of slavery for party pur- 
poses, or with a view to infringe upon the constitutional rights of the 
South. But if the North has given cause of complaint in this respect, the 
fault has been equally committed by the South. The subject has been 
fully as much abused there as here for party purposes, and if the North 
has ever made it the means of gaining a sectional triumph, she has but 
done what the South, for the last twenty-five years, has never missed an 
occasion of doing. With respect to every thing substantial in the com- 
plaints of the South against the North, Congress and the states have 
afforded or tendered all reasonable — all possible — satisfaction. She com- 
plained of the Missouri Compromise, although adopted in conformity with 
all the traditions of the government and approved by the most judicious 
Southern statesmen, and after thirty-four years' acquiescence on the part 
of the people, Congress repealed it. She asked for a judicial decision of 
the territorial question iu her favor, and the Supreme Court of the United 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 39 

States, in contravention of the whole current of our legislation, so decided 
it. She insisted on carrying this decision into effect, and three new 
territories, at the very last session of Congress, were organized in con- 
formity to it, as Utah and New Mexico had been before it was rendered. 
She demanded a guaranty against amendments of the constitution adverse 
to her interests, and it was given by the requisite majority of the two 
Houses. She required the repeal of the state laws obstructing the sur- 
render of fugitive slaves, and although she had taken the e^reme reme- 
dy of revolt into her hands, they were repealed or modified. Nothing 
satisfied her, because there was an active party in the cotton-growing 
states, led by ambitious men, determined on disunion, who were resolved 
not to be satisfied. In one instance alone the South has suffered defeat. 
The North, for the first time since the foundation of the government, has 
chosen a President by her unaided electoral vote ; and that is the occa- 
sion of the present unnatural war. I did not, as you know, contribute to 
that result, but I did enlist under the banner of "the Union, the constitu- 
tion, and the enforcement of the laws." Under that banner I mean to 
stand, and with it, if it is struck down, I am willing to fall. Even for 
this result the South has no one to blame but herself. Her disunionists 
would give their votes for no candidate but the one selected by leaders 
who avowed the purpose of effecting a revolution of the cotton states, and 
who brought about a schism in the democratic party directly calculated, 
probably designed, to produce the event which actually took place with 
all its dread consequences. 

I trust I have shown the flagrant injustice of this whole attempt to 
fasten upon the North the charge of wielding the powers of the federal 
government to the prejudice of the South. But there is one great fact 
connected with this subject, seldom prominently brought forward, which 
ought forever to close the lips of the South, in this warfare of sectional 
reproach. Under the old confederation the Congress consisted of but one 
House, and each state, large and small, had but a single vote and conse- 
quently an equal share in the government, if government it could be called, 
of the Union. This manifest injustice was barely tolerable in a state of 
war, when the imminence of the public danger tended to produce una- 
nimity of feeling and action. "When the country was relieved from the 
pressure of the war, and discordant interests more and more disclosed 
themselves, the equality of the states became a positive element of discon- 
tent, and contributed its full share to the downfall of that short-lived and 
ill-compacted frame of government. 

Accordingly, when the Constitution of the United States was formed, 
the great object and the main difficulty was to reconcile the equality of 



40 THE GREAT ISSUES 

the states (which gave to Rhode Island and Delaware equal weight with 
Virginia and Massachusetts), with a proportionate representation of the 
people. Each of these principles was of vital importance ; the first being 
demanded by the small states, as due to their equal independence, and the 
last being demanded by the large states, in virtue of the fact, that the Con- 
stitution was the work and the government of the people, and in confor- 
mity with the great law in which the revolution had its origin, that 
representation and taxation should go hand in hand. 

The prorJfem was solved in the federal convention by a system of ex- 
tremely refined arrangements, of which the chief was that there should be 
two Houses of Congress; that each state should have an equal represen- 
tation in the Senate (voting, however, not by states but per capita), and a 
number of representatives in the House in proportion to its population. 
But here a formidable difficulty presented itself, growing out of the anom- 
alous character of the population of the slaveholding states, consisting as 
it did of a dominant and a subject class — the latter excluded by local law 
from the enjoyment of all political rights and regarded simply as property. 
In this state of things, was it just or equitable that the slaveholding states, 
in addition to the number of representatives to which their free population 
entitled them, should have a further share in the government of the coun- 
try, on account of the slaves held as property by a small portion of the 
ruling class ? While property of every kind in the non-slaveholding states 
was unrepresented, was it just that this species of property, forming a 
large proportion of the entire property of the South, should be allowed to 
swell the representation of the slaveholding states ? 

This serious difficulty was finally disposed of, in a manner mutually 
satisfactory, by providing that representatives and direct taxes should be 
apportioned among the states on the same basis of population, ascertained 
by adding to the whole number of free persons three-fifths of the slaves. 
It was expected at this time, that the federal treasury would be mainly 
supplied by direct taxation. While, therefore, the rule adopted gave to 
the South a number of representatives out of proportion to the number 
of her citizens, she would be restrained from exercising this power to the 
prejudice of the North, by the fact that any increase of the public burdens 
would fall in the same increased proportion on herself. For the additional 
weight which the South gained in the Presidential election, by this ad- 
justment, the North received no compensation. 

But now mark the practical operation of the compromise. Direct tax- 
ation, instead of being the chief resource of the treasury, has been re- 
sorted to but four times since the foundation of the government, and then 
for small amounts, in 1798 two millions of dollars, in 1813 three millions, 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 41 

in 1815 six millions, in 1815 three millions again, in all fourteen millions, 
the sum total raised by direct taxation in seventy-two years, less than an 
average of two hundred thousand dollars a year. What number of repre- 
sentatives, beyond the proportion of their free population, the South has 
elected in former Congresses I have not computed. In the last Congress 
she was represented by twenty members in behalf of her slaves, being 
nearly one-eleventh part of the entire House. As the increasing ratio of 
the two classes of the population has not greatly varied, it is probable that 
the South, in virtue of her slaves, has always enjoyed about the same pro- 
portionate representation in the House in excess of that accruing from her 
free population. As it has rarely happened, in our political divisions, that 
important measures have been carried by large majorities, this excess has 
been quite sufficient to assure the South a majority on all sectional ques- 
tions. It enabled her to elect her candidate for the Presidency in 1800, 
and thus effect the great political revolution of that year, and is sufficient 
of itself to account for that approach to a monopoly of the government 
which she has ever enjoyed. 

Now, though the consideration for which the North agreed to this ar- 
rangement may be said to have wholly failed, it has nevertheless been 
quietly acquiesced in. I do not mean that in times of high party excite- 
ment it has never been alluded to as a hardship. The Hartford Conven- 
tion spoke of it as a grievance which ought to be remedied ; but even since 
our political controversies have turned almost wholly on the subject of 
slavery, I am not aware that this entire failure of the equivalent, for which 
the North gave up to the South what has secured her in fact the almost 
exclusive control of the government of the country, has been a frequent or 
a prominent subject of complaint. 

So much for the pursuit of the North of measures hostile to the inter- 
ests of the South ; — so much for the grievances urged by the South as her 
justification for bringing upon the country the crimes and sufferings of 
civil war, and aiming at the prostration of a government admitted by her- 
self to be the most perfect the world has seen, and under which all her 
own interests have been eminently protected and favored ; for, to complete 
the demonstration of the unreasonableness of her complaints, it is neces- 
sary only to add, that by the admission of her leading public men, there 
never was a time, when her " peculiar institution" was so stable and pros- 
perous as at the present moment. 

And now let us rise from these disregarded appeals to the truth of his- 
tory and the wretched subtleties of the secession school of argument, and 
contemplate the great issue before us, in its solemn practical reality. 
" Why should we not, " it is asked, " admit the claims of the seceding states, 



42 THE GREAT ISSUES 

acknowledge their independence, and put an end at once to the war?" 
"Why should we not?" I answer the question by asking another, " Why 
should we '?" What have we to hope from the pursuit of that course ? 
Peace ? But we were at peace before. Why are we not at peace now ? 
The North has not waged the war ; it has been forced upon us in self- 
defence ; and if, while they had the constitution and the laws, the execu- 
tive Congress and the courts, all controlled by themselves, the South, dis- 
satisfied with legal protections and constitutional remedies, has grasped 
the sword, can North and South hope to live in peace, when the bonds of 
Union are broken, and amicable means of adjustment are repudiated ? 
Peace is the very last thing which secession, if recognized, will give us ; 
it will give us nothing but a hollow truce — time to prepare the means of 
new outrages. It is in its very nature a perpetual cause of hostility ; an 
eternal, never-cancelled letter of marque and reprisal, an everlasting pro- 
clamation of border war. How can peace exist, when all the causes of 
dissension are indefinitely multiplied ; when unequal revenue laws shall 
have led to a gigantic system of smuggling, when a general stampede of 
slaves shall take place along the border, with no thought of rendition, and 
all the thousand causes of mutual irritation shall be called into action, on 
a frontier of fifteen hundred miles not marked by natural boundaries and 
not subject to a common jurisdiction or a mediating power ? We did be- 
lieve in peace ; fondly, credulously believed that, cemented by the mild 
umpirage of the federal Union, it might dwell forever beneath the folds of 
the star-spangled banner and the sacred shield of a common nationality. 
That was the great arcanum of policy ; that was the state mystery into 
which men and angels desired to look ; hidden from ages but revealed to 
us : 

" Which kings and prophets waited for, 
And sought, but never found:" 

a family of states independent for local concerns, united under one gov- 
ernment for the management of common interests and the prevention of 
internal feuds. There was no limit to the possible extension of such a 
system. It had already comprehended half of North America, and it 
might, in the lapse of ages, have folded the continent in its peaceful, be- 
neficent embrace. We fondly dreamed that, in the lapse of ages, it would 
have been extended till half the western hemisphere had realized the 
vision of universal, perpetual peace. From that dream we have been 
rudely startled by the array of ten thousand armed men in Charleston 
harbor, and the roar of eleven batteries raining a storm of iron hail on one 
poor, siege-worn company, because, in obedience to lawful authority, in 
the performance of sworn duty, the gallant Anderson resolved to keep his 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 43 

oath. That brave and faithful band, by remaining at their post, did not 
hurt a hair of the head of a Carolinian, bond or free. The United States 
proposed not to reinforce, but to feed them. But the Confederate leaders 
would not allow them even the poor boon of being starved into surrender ; 
and because some laws had been passed somewhere, by which it was al- 
leged that the return of some slaves (not one from Carolina) had been or 
might be obstructed, South Carolina disclaiming the protection of courts 
and of Congress, which had never been withheld from her, has inaugu- 
rated a ruthless civil war. If, for the frivolous reasons assigned, the se- 
ceding states have chosen to plunge into this gulf, while all the peaceful 
temperaments and constitutional remedies of the Union were within their 
reach, and offers of further compromise and additional guaranties were 
daily tendered them, what hope, what possibility of peace, can there be, 
when the Union is broken up, when, in addition to all other sources of 
deadly quarrel, a general exodus of the slave population begins (as beyond 
all question it will), and nothing but war remains for the settlement of 
controversies ? The Vice-President of the new confederacy states that it 
rests on slavery ; btit from its very nature it must rest equally on war ; 
eternal war, first between North and South and then between the smaller 
fragments into which the disintegrated parts may crumble. The work of 
demons has already begun. Besides the hosts mustered for the capture or 
destruction of Washington, Eastern Virginia has let loose the dogs of war 
on the loyal citizens of Western Virginia ; they are straining at the leash 
in Maryland and Kentucky ; Tennessee threatens to set a price on the 
head of her noble Johnson and his friends ; a civil war rages in Missouri. 
Why, in the name of heaven, has not Western Virginia, separated from 
Eastern Virginia by mountain ridges, by climate, by the course of her 
rivers, by the character of her population, and the nature of her industry, 
why has she not as good a right to stay in the Union which she inherited 
from her Washington, as Eastern Virginia has to abandon it for the mush- 
room confederacy forced upon her from Montgomery ? Are no rights 
sacred but those of rebellion ; no oaths binding but those taken by men 
already foresworn ; are liberty of thought, and speech, and action no- 
where to be tolerated except where laws are trampled underfoot, arsenals 
and mints plundered, governments warred against, and their patriotic de- 
fenders assailed by ferocious and murderous mobs ? 

Then consider the monstrous nature and reach of the pretensions in 
which we are expected to acquiesce; which are nothing less than that 
the United States should allow a foreign power, by surprise, treachery 
and violence, to possess itself of one half of their territory and all the pub- 
lic property ami public establishments contained in it; for if the Southern 



44 THE GREAT ISSUES 

Confederacy is recognized it becomes a foreign power, established along 
a curiously dove-tailed frontier of 1,500 miles, commanding some of the 
most important commercial and military positions and lines of communica- 
tion for travel and trade, half the sea-coast of the Union, the navigation of 
our Mediterranean Sea (the Gulf of Mexico, one-third as large as the 
Mediterranean of Europe), and, above all, the great arterial inlet into the 
heart of the continent, through which its very life-blood pours its imperial 
tides. I say we are coolly summoned to surrender all this to a foreign 
power. Would we surrender it to England, to France, to Spain ? Not an 
inch of it ; why, then, to the Southern Confederacy ? Would any other 
government on earth, unless compelled by the direst necessity, make such 
a surrender? Does not France keep an army of 100,000 men in Algeria 
to prevent a few wandering tribes of Arabs — a recent conquest — from 
asserting their independence ? Did not England strain her resources to 
the utmost tension to prevent the native kingdoms of Central India (civil- 
ized states two thousand years ago, and while painted chieftains ruled the 
savage clans of ancient Britain) from re-establishing their sovereignty; 
and shall we be expected, without a struggle, to abandon a great integral 
part of the United States to a foreign power ? 

Let it be remembered, too, that in granting to the seceding states jointly 
and severally the right to leave the Union, we concede to them the right 
of resuming, if they please, their former allegiance to England, France 
and Spain. It rests with them, with any one of them, if the right of se- 
cession is admitted, again to plant a European government side by side 
with that of the United States on the soil of America ; and it is by no 
means the most improbable upshot of this ill-starred rebellion, if allowed 
to prosper. The disunion press in Virginia last year openly encouraged 
the idea of a French Protectorate, and her legislature has, I believe, sold 
out the James River Canal — the darling enterprise of Washington — to a 
company in France supposed to enjoy the countenance of the Emperor. 
The seceding patriots of South Carolina were understood by the corre- 
spondent of the London Times to admit that they would rather be subject 
to a British Prince than to the government of the United States. Whether 
they desire it or not, the moment the seceders lose the protection of the 
United States they hold their independence at the mercy of the powerful 
governments of Europe. If the navy of the North should withdraw its 
protection, there is not a Southern state on the Atlantic or the Gulf which 
might not be recolonized by Europe, in six months after the outbreak of a 
foreign war. 

Then look at the case for a moment in reference to the acquisitions of 
territory made on this side of the continent within the present century — 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 45 

Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and the entire coast of Alabama and Missis- 
sippi ; vast regions acquired from France, Spain and Mexico within six- 
ty years. Louisiana cost 15,000,000 dollars, when our population was 
5,000,000, representing, of course, 90,000,000 of dollars at the present 
day. Florida cost 5,000,000 dollars in 1820, when our population was 
less than 10,000,000, equal to 15,000,000 dollars at the present day, be- 
sides the expenses of General Jackson's war in 1818, and the Florida 
war of 1840, in which some 80,000,000 of dollars were thrown away for 
the purpose of driving a handful of starving Seminoles from the Ever- 
glades. Texas cost 200,000,000 dollars, expended in the Mexican war, in 
addition to the lives of thousands of brave men; besides 10,000,000 dol- 
lars paid to her in 1850 for ceding a tract of land which was not hers to 
New Mexico. A great part of the expense of the military establishment 
of the United States has been incurred in defending the southwestern 
frontier. The troops, meanly surprised and betrayed in Texas, were sent 
there to protect her defenceless border-settlements from the tomahawk 
and sealping-knife. If to all this expenditure we add that of the forts, 
the navy-yards, the court-houses, the custom-houses, and the other pub- 
lic buildings in these regions, 500,000,000 dollars of the public funds, 
of which at least five-sixths are levied by indirect taxation from the 
North and Northwest, have been expended in and for the Gulf states in this 
century. Would England, would France, would any government on the 
face of the earth surrender without a death-struggle such a dear-bought 
territory ? 

But of this I make no account ; the dollars are spent ; let them go. But 
look at the subject for a moment in its relations to the safety, to the pros- 
perity and the growth of the country. The Missouri and the Mississippi 
rivers, with their hundred tributaries, give to the great central basin of 
our continent its character and destiny. The outlet of this mighty system 
lies between the states of Tennessee and Missouri, of Mississippi and Ar- 
kansas, and through the state of Louisiana. The ancient province so- 
called, the proudest monument of the mighty monarch whose name it 
bears, passed from the jurisdiction of France to that of Spain in 1763. 
Spain coveted it, not that she might fill it with prosperous colonies and 
rising states, but that it might stretch as a broad waste barrier, infested 
with warlike tribes, between the Anglo-American power and the silver 
mines of Mexico. With the independence of the United States the fear 
of a still more dangerous neighbor grew upon Spain, and in the insane ex- 
pectation of checking the progress of the Union westward, she threatened 
and at times attempted to close the mouth of the Mississippi on the rapidly 
increasing trade of the West. The bare suggestion of such a policy roused 



46 THE GREAT ISSUES 

the population upon the hanks of the Ohio, then inconsiderable, as one 
man. Their confidence in Washington scarcely restrained them from 
rushing to the seizure of New Orleans, when the treaty of San Lorenzo El 
Real in 1795 obtained for them a precarious right of navigating the noble 
river to the sea, with a right of deposit at New Orleans. This subject 
was for years the turning point of the politics of the West, and it was 
perfectly well understood that sooner or later she would be content with 
nothing less than the sovereign control of the mighty stream, from its 
head spring to its outlet in the- Gulf; and that is as true now as it was 
then. 

So stood affairs at the close of the last century, when the colossal power 
of the first Napoleon burst upon the world. In the vast recesses of his 
Titanic ambition he cherished as a leading object of his policy to acquire 
for France a colonial empire which should balance that of England. In 
pursuit of this policy he fixed his eye on the ancient regal colony which 
Louis XIV. had founded in the heart of North America, and he tempted 
Spain, by the paltry bribe of creating a kingdom of Etruria for a Bourbon 
prince to give back to France the then boundless wastes of the territory 
of Louisiana. The cession was made by the secret treaty of San Ildefonso 
of the 1st of October, 1800 (of which one sentence only has ever been 
published, but that sentence gave away half a continent), and the youth- 
ful conqueror concentrated all the resources of his mighty genius on the 
accomplishment of the vast project. If successful, it would have estab- 
lished the French power on the mouth and on the right bank of the Mis- 
sissippi, and would have opposed the most formidable barrier to the ex- 
pansion of the United States. The peace of Amiens, at this juncture, re- 
lieved Napoleon from the pressure of the war with England, and every 
thing seemed propitious to the success of the great enterprise. The fate 
of America trembled for a moment in a doubtful balance, and five hun- 
dred thousand citizens in that region felt the danger and sounded the 
alarm. (Speech of Mr. Ross in the Senate of the United States, 14th 
February, 1803.) 

But in another moment the aspect of affairs was changed, by a stroke 
of policy, grand, unexpected, and fruitful of consequences, perhaps with- 
out a parallel in history. The short-lived truce of Amiens was about to 
end. the renewal of war was inevitable. Napoleon saw that before he 
could take possession of Louisiana it would be wrested from him by Eng- 
land, who commanded the seas, and he determined at once, not merely to 
deprive her of this magnificent conquest, but to contribute as far as in him 
lay to build up a great rival maritime power in the West. The govern- 
ment of the United States, not less sagacious, seized the golden moment — 



NOW BEFORE THE COUNTRY. 47 

a moment such as does not happen twice in a thousand years. Mr. Jef- 
ferson perceived that, unless acquired by the United States, Louisiana 
would in a short time belong to France or to England, and with equal 
wisdom and courage he determined that it should belong to neither. True, 
he held the acquisition to be unconstitutional, but he threw to the winds 
the resolutions of 1798, which had just brought him into power; he broke 
the Constitution and he saved an empire. Mr. Monroe was sent to France 
to conduct the negotiation in conjunction with Chancellor Livingston, the 
resident minister, contemplating at that time only the acquisition of New 
Orleans and the adjacent territory. 

But they were dealing with a man that did nothing by halves. Napo- 
leon knew — and we know — that to give up the mouth of the river was to 
give up its course. On Easter-Sunday of 1803 he amazed his council with 
the announcement that he had determined to cede the whole of Louisiana 
to the United States. Not less to the astonishment of the American 
envoys, they were told by the French negotiators at the first interview, 
that their master was prepared to treat with them not merely for the Isle 
of New Orleans, but for the whole vast province which bore the name of 
Louisiana ; whose boundaries, then unsettled, have since been carried on 
the north to the British fine ; on the west to the Pacific Ocean — a territory 
half as big as Europe, transferred by a stroke of the pen. Fifty-eight 
years have elapsed since the acquisition was made. The states of Louis- 
iana. Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas, the territories of 
Nebraska, Dacotah and Jefferson, have been established within its limits 
on this side of the Rocky Mountains ; the state of Oregon and the territory 
of Washington on their western slope; while a tide of population is 
annually pouring into the region destined in addition to the natural in- 
crease, before the close of the century, to double the number of the states 
and territories. For the entire region west of the Alleghanies and east 
of the Rocky Mountains, the Missouri and the Mississippi form the natural 
outlet to the sea. Without counting the population of the seceding states, 
there are ten millions of the free citizens of the country, between Pitts- 
burg and Fort Union, who claim the course and the mouth of the Missis- 
sippi as belonging to the United States. It is theirs by a transfer of truly 
imperial origin and magnitude ; theirs by a sixty years' title ; theirs by 
occupation and settlement; theirs by the law of Nature and of God. 
Louisiana, a fragment of this colonial empire, detached from its main por- 
tion and first organized as a state, undertakes to secede from the Union, 
and thinks by so doing that she will be allowed by the government and 
people of the United States to revoke this imperial transfer, to disregard 
this possession and occupation of sixty years, to repeal this law of nature 



48 THE GREAT ISSUES, ETC 

and of God; and she fondly believes that ten millions of the free people 
of the Union will allow her and her seceding brethren to open and shut 
the portals of this mighty region at their pleasure. They may do so, and 
the swarming millions which throng the course of these noble streams 
and their tributaries may consent to navigate them by suffrance from 
Montgomery and Richmond; but, if I may repeat the words which I have 
lately used on another occasion, it will be when the Alleghanies and the 
Rocky Mountains, which form the eastern and western walls of the im- 
perial valley, shall sink to the level of the sea, and the Mississippi and the 
Missouri shall flow back to their fountains. 

Such, fellow-citizens, as I contemplate them, are the great issues before 
the country, nothing less, in a word, than whether the work of our noble 
fathers of the revolutionary and constitutional age shall perish or endure ; 
whether this great experiment in national polity, which binds a family of 
free republics in one united government — the most hopeful plan for com- 
bining the homebred blessings of a small state with the stability and 
power of great empire — shall be treacherously and shamefully stricken 
down, in the moment of its most successful operation, or whether it shall 
be bravely, patriotically, triumphantly maintained. We wage no war of 
conquest and subjugation; we aim at nothing but to protect our loyal 
fellow-citizens, who, against fearful odds, are fighting the battles of the 
Union in the disaffected states, and to re-establish, not for ourselves 
alone, but for our misguided brethren, the mild sway of the constitution 
and the laws. The result cannot be doubted. Twenty millions of free- 
men, forgetting their divisions, are rallying as one man in support of the 
righteous cause — their willing hearts and their strong hands, their for- 
tunes and their lives, are laid upon the altar of the country. We contend 
for the great inheritance of constitutional freedom transmitted from our 
revolutionary fathers. We engage in the struggle forced upon us, with 
sorrow, as against our misguided brethren, but with high heart and faith, 
as we war for that Union which our sainted Washington commended to 
our clearest affections. The sympathy of the civilized world is on our side 
and will join us in prayers to Heaven for the success of our arms. 



ELEGANTLY ILLUSTRATED EDITION 



OF 



COOPER'S NOVELS 

EMBELLISHED WITH FIVE HUNDRED ORIGINAL DRAWINGS 

By F. O. C. DARLEY. 



This beautiful Edition of Cooper's Works was commenced February 1st, 
1850, and will be completed in THIRTY-TWO MONTHS from that date, a 
volume containing a novel complete, being published on the first of each 
month. The volumes are uniform in size and binding, and each contains 
Two Engravings on Steel, and Twelve Sketches on Wood, designed by 
DARLEY, expressly for this edition, and engraved by the First Artists op 
tub Country. 

THE SERIES EMBRACES: 



THE PiONEERS, 
RED ROVER, 

LAST OF Till) MOHICANS, 

THE SPY, 

WYANDOTTE, 

THE BRAVO, 

THE PILOT. 

WEPT OF WISII-TOX-W1SII, WING AXD WING, 

THE HEADSMAN', THE CUAINBEARER, 

THE PRAIRIE, THE PATHFINDER, 



LIONEL LINCOLN', 
THE SEA LION'S, 
THE WATER WITCH, 
HOMEWARD BOUND, 
THE MOXIKIXS, 
HOME AS FOUND, 
SATANSTOE, 



JACK TIER, 

THE RED SKINS, 

THE TWO ADMIRALS, 

THE HEIDENMAUER, 

MERCEDES OF CASTILE, 

OAK OPENINGS, 

AFLOAT AXD ASHORE, 

MILES WALLIXGFORD, 

THE CRATER, 

THE WAYS OF THE HOUR, 



PRECAUTION, 



THE DEERSLAYER. 



The first Fifteen Volumes are issued in the above order; the remainder 
will follow the same arrangement as nearly as possible. As a 

NASriOlXJ^JL, ENTERPRISE 

the publication of this edition exceeds, both in magnitude and importance, 
any thing of the kind before undertaken in this country. COOPER has been 
''ustly styled 

"THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST," 

and the Publishers believe they have not mistaken the tastes of his counUy 
men in offering them this complete and elegant edition of his Works. 

Publishing by subscription, at $1 50 per volume, for which they will b* 
sent, post-paid, to any address in the United States, under 3,000 miles. The 
work can be obtained from local agents (generally the principal Booksellers) 
i.i all the large cities. 

BOOKSELLERS and others desiring an Agency where none has beet 
established, can ascertain terms, &c, by addressing the Publishers. 

JAMES G. GREGORY, Publisher, 

(SUCCESSOR TO W. A. TOWN8ENP A CO..) 

NO 4f> WAI.KKR STliKKT, N. Y. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 026 316 ""ft 
PUBLICATIONS FOR THE TIMES. 

I— THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER : Illus- 
trated FROM DRAWJNGS BY F. 0. C. DARLEY. 

The Publisher has now ready a beautiful parlor-table edition of "THE STAR 
SPANGLED BANNER," exquisitely Illustrated by F. O. 0. Darley, -Kith an Illu- 
minated Cover by John A. Hows, containing the Music, arranged by Francis II. Brown. 

This beautiful edition of our popular National Song is sold, with the Illustrations, at 
the ordinary price of the music alone, and is welcomed by all as an elegant and timely 
issue. Quarto. Price, 25 cents. 

II— THE GREAT ISSUES BEFORE THE 

COUNTRY : An Oration. By Edward Everett. Delivered 

at the New York Academy of Music, July 4th, 1861. 

The most masterly and exhaustive statement of the issues before the country which 
has yet been made. 12mo. 4S pp. Price, 15 cents. 

Ill— THE CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR: By 

John Lothrop Motley, LL.D., D.C.L., author of "The Rise of the 
Dutch Republic," and "History of the United Netherlands." 12mo 
40 pp. Uniform with " Everett's Oration." Price 10 cents. 

IV— THE FALLACY OF NEUTRALITY: Ax 

Address Delivered at Louisville, Ky., July 13th, by Hon. 
Joseph Holt; also his Letter to J. P. Speed, Esq. 12mo., uni- 
form with Everett's Oration. and Motley's Letter. Price, 10 cents. 

V.-NAPOLEON'S MAXIMS OF WAR : a Manual 

for Officers. 

RECOMMENDATION. 

"After refreshing my memory by looking over again 'The Officer's Manual,' or 
'Maxims of Napoleon,' I think I may safely recommend the republication, in Amer- 
ica, of the work in English, as likely to be called for by many officers, regular and 
volunteer. It contains a circle of maxims deduced from the highest source of military 
science 1 and experience, with practical illustrations of the principles taken from the 
most celebrated campaigns of modern times. The study of the book cannot fail to set 
all young officers on a course of inquiry and reflection grcntly to their improvement. 

"WINFIELD SCOTT." 

This little volume is of service and interest to Lhe officer, the soldier, the civilian. 
and to all interested in the art of war. 

One neat pocket volume, flexible cover. Price, CO cents. 

JAMES G. GREGORY, Pillisiiii:, 

(successor to v.-. a. townsend & CO.,) 

NO. 4G WALKER STREET, :. r . Y. 



IN PRES8. 

THE AMERICAN FLAG- : By Joseph Rodman Drake. 
Illustrated by E. 0. 0. Darley, and issued in style similar to " The 
Star Spangled Banner." 

PATRIOTIC AND HEROIC ELOQUENCE: A 

Volumo of Prose and Poetical Extracts from the Speeches ami 
Writings cf Distinguished Men. 12:no., Cloth. Price, T5 cents. 



